Redshift
by Road Rhythm
Summary: They're still reeling from Dean's stint in Purgatory, the Trials are tearing them apart, the world hangs in the balance (again)—and Dean wants to get a pool table and have a sex marathon. Of course he does.


It feels good, walking into the bunker, but it doesn't feel like home.

Sam doesn't say this, because he can see the light in Dean's eyes from the moment they bring the power back online. But he can't forget it, either, and he can't be at ease in here the way Dean wants him to.

That is not to say the bunker's not nice. It is. It is very, very nice. Sam hasn't ordered in a fancy mattress, but the one that was here to begin with is fine. Having a bathroom whose only mysteries are at least half a century old is spiritually liberating in a way only those who have lived on the road can appreciate, and Dean wasn't kidding about the water pressure either.

As a home base, the bunker has a lot going for it. This place has its own kitchen, and while Sam hasn't been using it much, he's sure as hell reaping the benefits. This place has its own library, and there's something about that that really does complete a circuit somewhere deep down inside of him, something that hasn't worked right since Jess died and an entire idea of a life ordered around books died with her. This place has class. This place has convenience. This place has a giant goddamned telescope.

And none of it's real.

The bunker has twelve-foot-thick, radiation-stopping, poured concrete walls. They do not feel solid to Sam. The bunker is warded almost literally to Hell and back. Sam does not trust the wards. The bunker is their birthright and may have seen generations of Winchesters before them. Sam recognizes nothing of his family in any part of this place. The bunker is supposed to be impossible to pinpoint supernaturally or electronically, but Sam knows it is only a matter of time before they are found, same as any cheap motel room. Worse, maybe: now they're sitting still.

Dean moves inside the bunker with a degree of relaxation Sam has rarely seen in him even in the home he'd shared with Ben and Lisa, maybe because the walls are thicker, maybe because he has less to protect. Dean walks, in point of fact, like he has something reliable at his back, which is exactly what Sam can't quite make himself believe. It isn't that he literally still thinks the world is an illusion. Rather, he's come to realize how little it matters whether it is or not. Brick and mortar and concrete: in the end, it's all as permeable as gauze. At least motel walls don't pretend to be anything more than a screen.

There's only ever been one place where Sam believed implicitly in the solidity of his surroundings.

It's not a problem, exactly. Sam's lived most of his life without any serious expectation of security, and so has Dean. Sam doesn't have to believe that the bunker will keep them safe in order to enjoy it. It's just that he wishes he could love it, because Dean does. He knows that should be enough.

: : :

Sam's two volumes deep in the Men of Letters' 1912 review of Mesopotamian demonology when Dean plunks a plate of chicken salad down in front of him, takes the chair catercorner to Sam's, puts his socked feet on the table about four inches away from Sam's food, and says, conversationally, "We should have a sex marathon."

Sam doesn't choke on his coffee, but he does freeze with one hand extended toward the plate. Several seconds later, he swallows. The taste is slightly iron.

"Uh."

"Think about it. When's the last time we had a place all to ourselves? Hell, when have we ever had a place all to ourselves?" Dean takes a bite of his own sandwich. "Gotta christen the pad, man."

Okay, so maybe that little flip in Sam's stomach is interest, and maybe when he blinks a few possibilities cross his mind, there and gone like the afterimage of a neon sign. If anything, that interest is only intensified by a twist of unaccustomed mortification. But warning bells are going off in his head even before he gets it together enough to think about it rationally and realize: he can't. He can't let get Dean that close, or he'll taste the blood in Sam's mouth and know.

Dean fucked him after the hellhound. They made it three hours down the highway before Dean jerked them off the road, reached for Sam, let out this sound that Sam wishes he could scrub from his brain, and curled viciously over his back even as he'd kissed him like he'd _eat_ Sam if he could, thrust into him like he could crawl inside. Fast, hard, brutal in a way it never was before Purgatory. It hurt like hell, and Sam got off like Vesuvius. Two weeks later, he still has bruises, and more than once he's jerked off alone in his own bed with one hand on his cock and the other digging into the remnants of Dean's marks. But that was right at the start of this thing, before the Trials had really begun to get their claws into him. Now, he needs to play for time.

It's lucky that Dean is getting off on what he thinks is Sam being flummoxed and uptight, because otherwise these, oh, fifteen, twenty seconds that Sam's been stammering might be awkward. As it is, Dean's smirking with a revolting degree of self-satisfaction. "We could try out that thing you wrote about in your diary in high school. You know, with the fleshlight and—"

"Dean!" Sam yelps.

"Aw, Sammy, you're blushing."

"I am not."

"You really are."

"Shut up."

"Didn't use the magic word."

"Shut the fuck up."

"You're a true Man of Letters, Sammy."

Sam clamps his lips together and shoots Dean a pissy look because goddamn it, he _is_ blushing, and the harder he tries to stop the hotter his face gets. "Trying to work here," he mutters, hunching up over his book.

The intensity of his own embarrassment has caught him off guard. Dean likes to tease him about being a prude, but they both know it's not true. They've done things with, for, and to each other that make mere incest the least of their crimes, and while maybe some part of Sam that's survived Heaven and Hell and everything in between still thinks, _What if Dad finds out?_, it only keeps him coming back for more. They've fucked plenty. Many of those fucking sessions were fairly involved, and a few were planned to one degree or another.

Yet somehow, Dean sitting across from him at _their_ table proposing they properly break in _their_ secret lair is the kinkiest thing Sam's heard in years.

"Sex marathon, Sammy." Dean balls up his napkin and lobs it at Sam's head.

"Here? In the graveyard headquarters of the—the supernatural Masonic Order?"

"Like it would be the first time. Everybody knows 'secret society' is code for 'orgies'." Dean takes his feet off the table and picks up a sheaf of Sam's notes.

"Now, there's a thought that's a real turn-on," Sam says dryly. He is pretty turned on, but he doesn't have to admit it.

"Sammy, are you saying you're not man enough for a sex marathon?"

Sam narrows his eyes. "That's your play here? Seriously?"

Dean gives him a sunny smile and sucks some trace amount of chicken salad off his fingers. "It's okay, you know. A lot of guys lose potency when they start to get on in years."

"Hilarious, Dean."

Now Dean's doodling on _Sam's fucking work_, probably a cock and balls and/or a pair of boobs. "If you screw up my notes—"

"You'll spank me?"

Sam jolts upright and the book clatters to the floor under the table. Not because of the lame innuendo; because Dean's foot is suddenly in his crotch. "Dean," he says warningly.

"Well, I guess I don't have to mail-order the Canadian Viagra just yet."

Sam takes hold of Dean's ankle and deliberately removes the foot from his lap before getting down under the table to retrieve his book. "Come on, Sammy," he hears Dean say through the tabletop, "all work and no play makes you a repressed son of a bitch."

Sam snakes one arm out and up to slap the book back onto the table. "I guess we'll just have to see."

He's got Dean's spread legs before him. Solid hardwood inches over his head doesn't give Sam a lot of room to work with, but something about the view is appealing. He can smell the clean laundry smell off of Dean's blue jeans from here.

Dean jumps when Sam wraps one hand around each ankle and runs them slowly up the inside of Dean's calves. Touch through fabric is better than skin-on-skin, sometimes. Sam ought to know; Dean's used it on him often enough. "Next time you're trying to sell somebody on a wild orgy, you might want to brush up on your foreplay," Sam says. "Footsie's only kinky in public."

"Yeah, whatever. Just try not to knock yourself out cold on the goddamned table." Sam slides his hands forward and rocks his thumbs into the the inside of Dean's thighs, just above the knee. "_Fuck_shitsonofabitch."

"I'm sorry, Dean, tell me again about how repressed I am?"

He can feel Dean's eyes on the top of his head but doesn't look up. He flexes his hands over his brother's thighs, presses his nose into the inseam of his jeans below one knee, breathes in, and feels the shiver.

Dean's voice is gravelly. "You going to do something anytime soon or wh—"

Sam takes hold of the chair legs and thrusts it back. The extra couple of feet give him room to come up between Dean's legs, pop the button on his jeans, and hook his thumbs into the waistband; Dean grunts and wriggles a little to help Sam pull the fabric open far enough. Dean's cock is rising through the slit of his boxers, and Sam could work around them, but he hates getting mouthfuls of cotton, so he reaches around to take Dean's Gerber from the back of his jeans, snaps it open, and cuts through the boxers' elastic before Dean can do more than hiss at the touch of metal on his belly. Sam closes the blade. Dean's turned on enough that his hips are already rocking up, but he still shoves one hand under the table and snaps his fingers impatiently until Sam slaps the knife back into his palm.

Then Sam swallows him down.

Sam likes sucking cock. There's something about it that's almost meditative; he can drop away into a certain space inside his head, where Dean's groans and panting echo just that bit more loudly and the smell of him replaces oxygen. He slides his hands around and under Dean's ass, digs his fingers into the denim, and hauls him up, further into his mouth. Loves it. Loves pulling those sounds out. As good as pulling demons, almost.

He vaguely feels Dean's hands tangled in his hair. "Jesus, Sammy, yeah, like that—"

Spit's getting everywhere. All over his face, down into the hair on Dean's balls, onto the front of Dean's freshly laundered blue jeans. Sam makes a small noise around the cock in his mouth and sucks harder.

Dean comes in minutes, flooding Sam's mouth with the taste, and it's almost more than Sam can take, combined with his own saliva. But he manages. Come isn't a flavor he much relishes, but once it hits air it becomes revolting, so he swallows unfailingly. Religiously, you might even say.

Dean slumps back in his chair. Through his own unrelieved arousal, Sam realizes that the floor is killing his knees. Moving carefully, he extracts himself from Dean's lap and the table and stands, rubbing a crick out of his neck. He spares Dean a smirk.

"That was a brand-new pair of underwear, you asshole."

"They're four-ninety-nine a pack, Dean."

"Pardon me for not shopping at Victoria's Secret like you."

Sam starts to retort, but a tickle starts at the back of his throat. Come has always dried out his mouth, and before he can reach for his coffee, the tickle touches off a coughing fit that starts in his throat and moves down into his chest and the deep, tearing pain there. Copper crowds out the taste of semen.

"You okay?" Dean is terrible at faking casual.

Sam blinks to clear his watering eyes. Dean's standing with one hand poised in midair in a way that he probably thinks is subtle, as if he's waiting for Sam to collapse. All his life, Sam's felt Dean's hands trailing off of him, sometimes comforting, sometimes cloying, but there's something different about it lately. Now it feels less like fear than certainty: certainty that Sam will fail, certainty that Sam will need his intervention.

Sam straightens up out of his cough and sees worry in Dean's eyes again, and fuck that.

He checks Dean up against the door frame, hard. Not as hard as in a fight, but maybe about as hard as in sparring. Dean's body tenses automatically under his hands, an instinctual reaction to the promise of a fight. He lights up with lust at the same time, nostrils flaring, pupils dilating. The lust doesn't follow his reflexive switch to fight mode; it's part of the same reaction, one that has nothing to do with Sam and everything to do with the fight. That's when Sam knows that it's not just Benny he's jealous of. It's all of Purgatory.

Sam yanks Dean's jeans down. "I'm fine."

Dean's just watching him, pants around his knees and a glow in his eyes like a well sated predator. It offends Sam that he can look so relaxed when he should look ridiculous. He steps in and starts working on Dean's shirt, fumbling with the buttons and stripping it down his arms while Dean kicks his jeans and the remains of his boxers the rest of the way off. Sam gets his mouth on Dean's neck while Dean shoves his hands up underneath Sam's tee shirt, and at least now he can hear the unsteadiness in Dean's breathing when he bites down and sucks. Gritty concrete rasps against his hands as he presses his erection hard into Dean's belly, makes him feel it where he's softest. Dean starts making noises and grappling with Sam's belt, and maybe that's a little gratifying.

Dean gets Sam's belt open, but Sam drops down before Dean can touch him and grabs the abandoned jeans, turns out the pockets. Bingo. Lubricated condom and one of those packets of KY out of a coin-operated dispenser, because Dean is the fucking Scout Master. Sam slots himself back against him and hooks one arm under the knee Dean obligingly raises. He lets Dean slick the condom down with one hand and bruise Sam's back with the fingertips of the other while Sam opens the lube packet with his teeth.

He doesn't give Dean much prep, not that Dean seems to want it. He just shoves home as soon as he can and stands still, burying his face in Dean's shoulder with a shudder. Dean breathes out what might be an expletive.

The cotton of Dean's undershirt grates against the wall with each heavy, deliberate thrust. Sam's got his eyes closed and his teeth on Dean's neck, but he's listening. He doesn't miss the catches in Dean's breath or the drag of his nails on Sam's ass or the fact that his cock has gone half-hard again. He catalogues them all, the way the Men of Letters did every piece of supernatural flotsam that found its way into their nets. Dean dips his head to chase Sam's mouth, but Sam keeps turning away from it to suck or lick or bite something else. Every breath hurts deep in his chest.

It lasts even less time than the blow job; Sam finds the edge of his own arousal and focuses on nothing but getting where he wants to go and bruising Dean's tailbone. He feels the end coming, wraps both hands under Dean's ass, and lifts him bodily as he thrusts home one last time. Not a trick he can pull off for very long, but if Dean's groan is anything to go by, he gets his point across.

Forehead against the wall, Sam gives himself a moment to catch his breath. He lowers Dean back to the floor, drags his mouth once across Dean's, pulls away, disposes of the condom, and tidies himself away into his jeans. Then he sits back down to his notes and takes a bite of the chicken sandwich.

He pretends he doesn't notice Dean gaping at him.

Finally Dean's head thunks back against the wall before there's the rustle of him retrieving his pants off the floor. "I'm gonna pay you back for that one."

"Uh-huh," Sam says serenely, without looking up.

"And now I've got to change my damned underwear."

"Unaccustomed for you, I know."

"Screw you."

Smugness blends with the burn in Sam's chest until it's almost enjoyable. "Little late for that."

He doesn't see Dean run his tongue over his lips, tasting them with a frown.

: : :

The bunker's telescope is enshrined in its own niche at the back of the library. Sam can't help thinking of it that way: _enshrined_. The Men of Letters clearly favored function over luxury, building primarily with brick and poured concrete, but for the telescope's niche, they splashed out for red velvet drapes like a church for a saint's statue. The thing deserves it, too; judging by the size of the main barrel, the primary mirror is a foot and a half in diameter if it's an inch. It has the grave, quiet presence unique to really massive, precision-machined pieces of metal.

Sam's eyes are drawn to it from the moment they switch on the lights, but he makes himself wait to use it. They just found this place; there are things to do first, like trace the electrical wiring, resurrect the plumbing, inspect the storage areas, get a handle on the Men of Letters' somewhat idiosyncratic cataloguing system. Then, after that, there are jobs. There are always jobs. After a while, Sam forgets that the telescope isn't just part of the decor.

It's Artemis who makes him remember. Only the next day, when he has hours to of driving to do nothing but think, does it really sink in: he has met the goddess of hunting. Their goddess. They have one, and he's met her.

Asphalt rolls by, spotted with old snow, and he falls to thinking about old legends and old gods who supposedly froze them in the stars. Sam remembers Jess, one semester when she was taking Homeric Greek, deep in a flotsam of lexicons and grammars and other accoutrements of dead language translation that Sam pretended to know nothing about. Other details Sam thought dead in him come bobbing up as the miles pass and he and Dean trade seats, slow to surface but almost shockingly vivid when they do. She had a postcard of a black-figure pot of Athena appearing to Telemachus, and one of the sacrifice of Iphigenia. She called her Greek lexicon by some kind of pet name. She worked late for a week on paper on Odysseus in the underworld. Sam fell asleep on the couch one night, and he kept waking up to see her lit ghostly blue by her laptop, talking softly to herself: _Then I saw Minos, son of Jove, sitting in judgment over the dead. After him I saw huge Orion in a meadow full of asphodel, driving the ghosts of the wild beasts that he had killed. After him I saw Hercules. After him I saw Big Bird. After him I saw Pol Pot._

Orion the Hunter, handsomest of men, hunting forever in a world of shades. _And he had a great bronze club in his hand, unbreakable forever and ever._ Simultaneously, if you can believe a dick like Zeus, Orion is burning away up in the sky, and they have a massive Ritchey-Chrétien telescope just sitting in their lair untried. Sam doesn't even know what the stars in Orion would look like through it.

When they get back, he decides to find out. As they're humping their gear inside, Sam gets another coughing fit; when Dean lowers his duffel and heads towards him, Sam pretends not to see and goes deliberately to the telescope. Bent over the device, he hears Dean shoulder his bag again, receding footsteps, and eventually the slam of a bedroom door. Sam lets his breath out. Then he carefully turns a knob marked _aperture_, removes the protective cap from the eyepiece, and looks in.

All he sees is black.

His first thought is that he's missed something obvious and important about the instrument's function, but after looking it over and then back into the eyepiece, he realizes that there are cracks in the blackness. The telescope is broken.

The weight of his disappointment catches him off guard, and his analytic brain kicks in to distract him from it: this floor is buried about forty feet underground. Then there's the abandoned factory on top of that, another three stories. All of this means a shaft, which in turn means a periscope mechanism of some kind. Everything here in the bunker is pristine, free even of dust, but that mechanism would have to be far more vulnerable. Stupid to think it would've survived sixty-plus years unscathed, really.

He's bent over the schematics for the telescope when Dean comes back in, crosses to where Sam's left a chair pulled up to the telescope, peers in, and says, "Dude, is our telescope broken?"

"I don't think it's the telescope itself."

"How do you mean?"

Sam scans the diagram in front of him. "The Letters built a custom shaft to collect light all the way down here. A periscope, basically. I think there's been damage to that, probably at the outermost parts; some portion of the moving parts is broken and at least one of the mirrors is cracked." He slaps a hand onto the table and lets his breath out. "All of which was custom-machined and fitted. Damn it."

"Not easy to replace, then?"

Sam looks up; Dean's walking around the telescope slowly. "Yeah, probably not," he says after a moment.

"Are we talking about one of those million-dollar NASA mirrors they make in vacuum chambers and grind down into perfect parabolas, or hyperbolas, or whatever?"

"No, the mirror itself is probably flat, although it would have to be a good one. But the mechanism is the bigger problem. There's no telling which part is even broken." Sam folds the schematics away into the manual for the telescope and closes it with a thump. "Whatever, it doesn't matter. We've got bigger things to worry about."

Dean looks like he wants to say something more, but he doesn't.

: : :

A week later, Dean knows everything and none of the distance Sam tried to keep matters.

A mere four hours gets them from Meg's cooling corpse to the bunker. _Four hours._ Their father would turn in his grave, if he had one. Granted, that's four hours with Dean behind the wheel, but it still doesn't seem very far. Far enough to stop for the night, sure. It's a state line and almost four hundred miles away from the most recent bodies that can be attributed to them and Crowley's last lock on their whereabouts; they've done worse. But it's different when they're not just stopping for a night, and as profound a relief as it is to come back to somewhere with a clean bathroom and no check-out time, it makes Sam's instincts mutter. He and Dean let themselves in and dump their stuff the same way they made most of the car trip: in silence.

Dean goes away into the bowels of the place and returns with a bottle of whiskey that's coming up on its eightieth birthday. Sam puts two of the cut-crystal tumblers on a library table; Dean puts on the Men of Letters' LP of Ella Fitzgerald; and they each take a chair, put their feet up on the table, touch their glasses together, and drink.

This place makes Dean more civilized. That's a relief, after everything. The bunker can't take Purgatory out of him, but it maybe flips his instincts over to a different, less violent setting and lets Dean remember older parts of himself—older than Sam, some of them. So now they're sitting here, in their _library_, which Sam can't quite feel proprietary over but which is… good, cosy, while Ella wraps them up in her voice, taking part in what feels dangerously like a wake.

In a way, Meg knew Sam better than anyone currently on the planet ever has or, God willing, ever will. Even Dean. He realizes only now that that's made him feel—bonded to her. He resents that. She's one of the last threads that goes back almost to the beginning, and now she's been severed. The relief of knowing that she's gone, really gone at last, is intense. Tattoo notwithstanding, some corner of his nightmares has always been reserved for what she felt like in his skin.

He wonders for a while why anything Meg has done with him is still bothering him, considering, and an answer ambles through his head at a nice, get-thee-behind-me-Satan tempo: you never forget your first. Sam snorts into his glass before he can catch himself.

Dean looks over for the first time. At least, Sam thinks it's the first time. He's been pretty wrapped up in his own thoughts, and Dean watches him a lot, lately. "What?" Dean asks.

"Nothing. I don't know."

_Someone I'm mad about is waiting in the dark for me,_ Ella sings. _Someone that I mustn't see. Satan, get thee behind me._

Dean tips back the last of his glass, then refills Sam's, then his own. "Ding-dong, the bitch is dead," he says, without much gladness.

Sam flexes his fingers over the glass. The whiskey is really pretty in the mellow light and the lead crystal facets. "Cas liked her. She can't have been all bad," Sam says, not because he believes it but because it is an argument that can be made, and Sam therefore thinks he should make it.

Dean's turn to snort. "You guys have both got lousy taste in chicks."

Unspoken here is the thought weighing on both of them: they left an ally behind to die. It is way, way more complicated than that, yet it's still true.

Dean fills their glasses a third time, even though Sam's isn't quite empty. Sam drinks it anyway, staring at the blind telescope. The liquor is mellow on his tongue but acid in his stomach. He wants to ask about Cas: what he said, what's been done to him, precisely how much he did to Dean. _Stay where you are; it's too late. It's too late…._

"Bed?" Dean says eventually.

Glancing over, Sam sees that Dean's glass is empty. His isn't, but it's _very_ old whiskey, so he knocks the remainder back even though it takes an effort to get his throat to close around it. "Yeah. Better turn in."

As they leave the library, he turns right, and Dean turns left. They sleep with a whole room between them, now.

Sam's at the door to his room when nausea rolls over him, burning with bile and alcohol and blood. He feels himself blanch and knows there's no stopping it. Fuck, fuck, _fuck—_

He makes it to the toilet, albeit with a hand clamped over his mouth and vomit slipping through his fingers. Then he's heaving. Over and over, long after his stomach's emptied and it feels like his body's trying to turn everything south of there inside-out, too. Finally he winds down and just hangs there, looking blearily into the bowl. There are red streaks in the contents.

He waits to feel Dean hovering behind him, or Dean's hand on his back, or to hear Dean make a crack about holding his hair; but the bathroom is on the same corridor as Sam's bedroom, not Dean's, and metaphysically solid or not, the walls in here are pretty great at stopping sound. He's finally got the privacy he's been angling for all their lives. He feels about twenty degrees too cold inside.

That night marks the start of what Sam comes to think of as the Purge. For three days, it seems he can do nothing but shiver and shit and puke. Mainly the puking, with shivering a close second. He can see it's killing Dean—and also kind of disgusting him, which strikes Sam as a healthy sign. Semi-feral Dean might be, but at least he's still capable of being revolted by his little brother puking on his shoe like a normal, real human being no matter how patient he tries to be about it.

For all the misery on both sides, Sam can't quite regret this stage of the Trials. That this is bound up with the Trials he has no doubt; with the hurling and shitting and even the cold comes a sense that this isn't just a side-effect, but something necessary and intended. That all of it's intended, this and whatever's waiting for him. That the Trials were never meant to be discrete tasks, but a continuous state of testing. Of purification. The thought doesn't pull together as cleanly as that in his mind, but the idea sticks like a splinter and slowly works its way in, rather than out.

_Purge_. His mind finally coughs up the label one day when he's in the shower, trying to get warm. This bunker was built for a crew, not just a couple of guys, and so the shower room consists of a cavernous box tucked into the back of the floor above the library, with a soaking tub to which Dean gave two-and-a-half stars in one corner and six unpartitioned shower heads. What Sam likes best about it in here, after the bone-pounding water pressure and a heater with the capacity of an oil tanker, is that there are no windows. The showers lie at the end of a twisting corridor that cuts off even the faintest ray of light from beyond. If you don't turn the lights on, it's as perfectly dark in here as in a cave. Sam finds it restful. He can come up here, leaving the lights and headaches downstairs, and surround himself with heat and benign white noise. The dark is more solid than the edifice, and the experience is better than sleep. At least, it's better than the sleep he's been getting.

He breathes in deep, drawing steam into his lungs.

"Sammy?"

Sam flinches at a sudden flood of light. Through the fog, he sees Dean standing in the doorway, his finger on the light switch, staring at him. "Dude," says Dean, "what the hell are you doing up here?"

"…Showering?"

"For half an hour? In the dark?"

Sam looks up at the shower head, then at the soap where it sits in the niche in the wall, still dry, then at the water swirling into the drain at his feet. The lines of the tiles are harsh in the light. None of the lies he can think of would do him any favors here, and he did tell Dean he'd be honest, so finally he says, "I was trying to get warm."

"You have to be in the dark for that?" Dean says, mystified.

Sam feels naked. He is naked, of course, but suddenly he feels extra-naked the way you don't feel truly wet until you jump into the swimming pool with all your clothes on. "No, it's just less bright."

"Less bright."

"Yeah."

"Less bright with the lights off. Wow. That explains everything."

To Sam's surprise, the light shuts off. He looks around himself automatically, but it's pitch-black again. There's a long interval of the blank, warm, white noise of the shower, and he figures that Dean has accepted his weirdness and left him to it. Then he hears a foot slap wet on the tiles right beside him, and the next shower head over comes to life.

Metal squeaks to Sam's left, and he starts when a hand lands on his side. Dean has angled the second shower head to collide with the first one so that they're in one big, enveloping cataract of heat, and that is _genius_, Jesus Christ, why didn't Sam think of that? It's not like they have a water bill to pay.

Dean is slow in working himself under the spray. It occurs to Sam, too late to be useful, that that's probably because Sam has the water set as hot as it'll go, but there's this stubborn cold wrapped around his viscera that he's been trying to wash out, and anything cooler doesn't even feel warm at this point.

He shivers before he can stop himself. Without a word, Dean wraps himself around Sam from behind and starts rubbing his arms as if that could do what the better part of an hour under scalding water couldn't. The thing is, it can, and it does. The deep, steady rub of Dean's palms over his skin and Dean's chest against his back are so much better than the water.

Minutes of long, warm, steam-laden breaths go by. Sam gradually stops huddling in on himself. It's natural for Dean's arms to fall down to around Sam's middle as he straightens; the nails of one hand scrape cautiously, deliberately at Sam's side. Sam sucks in a breath. That more-naked-than-naked feeling is back, this time with an electric tingle low in his gut. They can't see each other, and talking seems wrong in darkness this total. There's nothing to go on but touch, and the blindness amplifies every one, like some kind tactile echo. Sam can't see his hand in front of his face. It crosses his mind that they could do anything in here. It's not a thought that makes any sense; they're big boys who can do anything, anywhere, and have. _But_.

Sam reaches backwards; he doesn't even know what he's aiming for, but he ends up with a handful of Dean's ass and is pretty okay with that outcome, especially when Dean's dick pokes his thigh with the first signs of interest. Dean flattens his hand over Sam's belly, mouths at Sam's shoulder blade, bites down lightly, sucks. It produces a ridiculous, noisy slurp in the water that probably shouldn't be a turn-on.

Sam turns around without stepping back any further than he has to and crowds forward again into Dean's body. Bones, muscle, movement. That's Dean's arm around his back, Dean's fingers working down the knobs of his spine in something like a massage and Sam groans aloud and he can only tell Dean's breath from the steam by the human smell and God, it's good to kiss someone, warm and warm and warm. Awkward, because water keeps getting in their mouths, but good. Sam runs his fingernails over a long, twisting line of scar tissue that starts in Dean's armpit and runs around and over his front ribs. It's an ugly one, and it's new; but though Sam hates to admit it, Dean's skin has had worse years.

Dean makes it to the end of Sam's spine and grabs his ass, digging into the muscle, working and spreading the cheeks. Sam grins against Dean's neck. It's not that Dean's incapable of subtlety, just that he's never really seen the point.

Sam fumbles a hand between them. Wet skin has a certain drag to it; it makes their cocks catch together almost painfully before they slide in the water, makes Dean's erection feel different in his hand. They're both hard, but not desperate-hard, and it's kind of nice that way. Sam's got a little to play with, can work the delicate foreskin down over the shaft, rub it over the tip under his thumb. He feels Dean's fingernails scraping at the inside of his thighs and thinks he could do this for ages.

Apparently Dean can't. He reaches around and knocks Sam's hand out of the way, and then he grabs Sam by the dick and _tugs_. It can't be to make him move, because there's nowhere to go but into Dean, but if it's to tell Sam that he'd better go and stay wherever the hell Dean wants to put him, then it works. It's a sensation just on the edge of painful that comes up from the root and reaches back past his balls, and it takes conscious effort on Sam's part to keep his knees from buckling. Fingers knot in his hair and then he feels Dean's cock prodding his head-to-head, and Dean is rolling Sam's foreskin down and over himself.

Sam grabs at Dean's shoulder in sheer surprise.

They're leaking enough to slide over each other, and around each other, and this is the weirdest goddamned sensation Sam has ever felt in his life, maybe. That's Dean's taut slit rubbing against his, slick in the precome. That is the head of someone else's cock his foreskin is caught around, that Dean's fingers are working it around, tugging, twisting, tying them together. Sam has had Dean's cock so far up inside him he thought he'd choke on it, but this is the most bizarrely, physically intimate sensation he never imagined. Dean's other hand is pumping on his shaft, firmness of his grip working over the pressure again and again, and Sam comes almost before he knows he's going to.

Dean holds them together for as long as he can, still nudging into Sam's cock through all the come and mouthing at his neck and pulling Sam's loosening skin further and further over himself. Then he drops them, wraps his arms around Sam's back and ruts against Sam's hip. He slides easily across Sam's belly until the shower washes the semen away and each drag of his cock is harsh enough it must be hurting Dean. Sam kisses him, warm and watery and slightly iron, until Dean finishes.

Once Sam feels Dean's cock slip from his skin, he gropes for the soap, and after Dean's had his turn with it, Sam cleans himself, working the lather under his foreskin to get everything and feeling a little stunned.

Dean's voice breaks the blackness. "Showered enough, now?"

Sam breathes out. "Yeah."

"Good, because this is going to be one hell of a water bill."

"We don't have a water bill."

"It's the principle of the thing."

They shut off the water and find their way to the towels. After the shower, the air is freezing. Sam keeps his towel wrapped around his shoulders even after he's in a robe and hopes it isn't too obvious why. He's grateful when Dean doesn't turn the lights on.

At the bottom of the stairs, Dean puts a hand on Sam's back and propels him towards Dean's room before Sam can turn towards his own. It's somewhere between casual and deliberate, and it gives Sam a dopey, happy feeling. They don't often sleep in the same bed, but they've slept in the same room for most of their lives and it's been weeks, now, since that ended. Most of the time, Sam enjoys the extra space as much as Dean seems to. Right now, though, he feels raw and wrung out, and when he hits Dean's mattress face-first and breathes in the smell, it feels—nice.

Dean's cold foot prods at his leg. "Get up, asshole, you're getting my duvet wet."

"_Duvet_?" Sam says into it, not bothering to hide his incredulity. It's a fluffy cotton thing.

"Fuck you, that came from the classy part of the Walmart." Something soft lands on Sam's back. "Move, Gigantor."

Sam rolls off, taking the tee-shirt and boxers Dean dropped on him. Dean's got extra blankets in his arms, magicked up from one of the bureaus in here, and they look warm. Sam climbs into the borrowed PJs, helps Dean with the bedclothes (woolen army blankets) and the salt line (devil's traps in the floor are a nice touch, but they won't stop everything), and checks over the guns they're going to sleep with (the Glock 19 on the wall is mostly Sam's, anyway). Normal, commonsense precautions.

He didn't do any of it when he was with Amelia. Partly that was because she would have freaked, but he already hadn't been doing it for weeks when he met her. He carried a hex bag and Ruby's knife and kept the trunk's contents at the ready, but the rest of it—the salt, the charms, the sigils, all of it—he just left by the wayside. Some nights, he lay in her bed (_their bed, theirs_) with her sleeping beside him and wondered why he didn't feel guilty for it. He left her as unprotected as he did himself, after all—more so, since she didn't even know the danger. He told himself at the time that the best precaution was to stay out of the life, all the way out, and that even hunters' defenses were too close to hunting. Probably true, but still a rationalization. Even now, he isn't certain why he let so much drop, but he thinks it had something to do with the way ever since he escaped the Cage, objects sometimes feel insubstantial under his fingers. Just a little, just for a moment. Just occasionally.

"Hey." Dean's got his hand on the light switch. "We hitting the sack, or what?"

Sam looks down, finds the Glock still in his hands, checks the slide, and sets it on the nightstand. This life feels less like a story than the other one. "Yeah."

The bed isn't all that wide, so it takes some maneuvering. Sam tries to hang his legs off the side—he's a guest here, after all—until Dean hooks one foot under Sam's ankles and hauls him back in. He can feel Dean's body heat along his back.

Maybe because they both just got off, maybe because they've got a vampire hunt to get to in the morning, maybe because squeezing into the same bed is so unfamiliar these days, neither is asleep ten minutes later. Finally Dean speaks.

"Why do you hate sex marathons, Sammy?"

There's a certain mocking in Dean's tone, but he's using it to mask curiosity. Sam stares at the wall. The darkness isn't perfect in here. "Who says I hate sex marathons?"

"I mean, I get it if you're not up to it—"

"Oh, fuck you."

"—just wondered." The worst of it is that that last sentence of Dean's sounded mostly sincere. He's gone from prowling around like he was half-inclined to slit Sam's throat to treating him like he's made of glass, and though Sam knows he's not in a position to complain about anyone else's brothering (oh, has he ever been made aware), he is not a fan of the goddamned whiplash. "Don't you like this place?" Dean asks, not quite keeping the plaintive note out of his voice.

"I do like it," Sam says truthfully. He isn't sure what answer to give. He has thought about Dean's proposal a few times since Dean first brought it up. More than once since the first Trial, it's crossed Sam's mind that the time he has left could be very finite, and that perhaps he should enjoy as much as he can. Something in the idea is clearly important to Dean, if he's still thinking about it even now, and Dean's surely correct in thinking that this is the best opportunity they're ever going to get for—for something like what Dean wants to do.

"But?" When Sam doesn't answer, Dean adds, "If it's fucking up normal for you, all that picket fence crap, I get it, I do, and trust me, I don't want to screw with that."

Abruptly Sam turns over. What he can see of Dean's face is closed off. Half a dozen responses cross his mind, none with the remotest chance of passing his lips:

_You keep saying that you want me to die old and married and normal, but you rip it out by the roots every time I get close._

_You make me wonder why I ever wanted normal (if I ever really did) and I hate you for it._

_Make up your mind about whether it means anything when we fuck around or not._

_This isn't our home, this isn't anybody's home, it wasn't even their home._

_It won't fix anything._

_So, did you ever ever tell Lisa about all the times you fucked your brother?_

He doesn't say any of it. What he finds himself saying instead is, "You remember Hell, right?"

Dean goes rigid beside him. Sam should feel guilty, but he doesn't.

"Yeah. Yeah, I remember," Dean says finally.

"That was real. Whatever else it was, it was real. Really, really real. This isn't. I mean, it's real, because it matters, but it doesn't matter because it's real. It just isn't solid. Which is okay. Nothing is. There's nothing wrong with that, or with something temporary, or… I mean, permanent isn't the same as important. It's— I can't explain."

"Try," says Dean, and there's an edge in his voice now.

Sam makes a frustrated noise. "This wall, okay?" He slaps it between the slats of the headboard. "It'll stop your hand and maybe some bullets, but that doesn't make it real. You know it doesn't."

Understanding is dawning in Dean's eyes. "Sammy. No. No, I don't know that. _You_ don't know that."

It occurs to Sam for the first time that maybe Dean doesn't. It seems incredible, but maybe Dean, despite having been down there, too, has been able to forget what Sam can't. "Look, it doesn't matter."

"It doesn't—? Jesus fucking Christ, Sam, it matters!"

"It doesn't matter because it was never walls and rocks and—and—_duvets_ that mattered, anyway. People matter. If anything, that's clearer to me than it ever was before I went to Hell. But ever since I got back, I can't make myself forget that things aren't substantial the way people think they are."

Dean pushes himself up on his elbow. "Ever since you got back? What the hell are you talking about? Cas _cured_ you."

"You cure delusions, Dean."

Sam didn't expect Dean to turn so white. "What the hell, Sammy. You said you saw a light at the end of this tunnel."

"I do," says Sam, and he can't understand where Dean sees the contradiction. "Maybe this place is even part of it. All the knowledge in here— It could save a lot of lives, maybe even reshape the playing field entirely. But I don't—trust it." He lapses into silence.

He can't deal with the look on Dean's face anymore. He turns over, as casually as someone his size can in a bed this narrow. "We should get some sleep," he says. "Long drive tomorrow."

After a while, he hears Dean shift, feels the draft disappear as Dean lowers himself back down to the mattress and the bedclothes settle. There's more shifting, and then Sam feels Dean's back press against his. Just his back, like he wants not to have to look at Sam but also know exactly where he is at the same time. Then nothing. Not a twitch of the pillow or scratch of the nose. No small, drowsy movements. It's the kind of total stillness from a bed partner that almost compels equal stillness from you in turn. Sam lies next to Dean, breathing shallowly and staring at the wall.

The stillness presses down in silence. Sam can't hear enough of Dean's breathing to tell if he's asleep or not; he closes his eyes and tries to tune out the sheer, sudden uncomfortableness. He thinks about slipping from under the blankets and retreating to his own room. But his bed is cold, and this one is warm, body-warm air under the blanket, solid-warm of Dean's back against Sam's. So he stays. Eventually, he does fall asleep.

Dean's already gone when he wakes up, but so is some of the pervasive cold.

: : :

When Kevin tells them the second task is to go to Hell, Sam's brain stutters and he thinks, stupidly, _But I just got warm_.

Common, bodily cold has so little in common with the cold in the Cage that, honestly, Sam rarely connects the two. Being cold up here never triggered flashbacks, not even when he still hallucinated. He's not even sure it's possible to flash back to that. Most of the time, he couldn't bring Lucifer's cold properly to mind even if he tried; to do so would require access to concepts that have no analogues up here, that he's grateful to have lost but nevertheless keeps probing for like a tongue where a tooth's missing. Basically, there's cold and then there's _cold_. Cold that doesn't need bodies. Cold in the spaces between spaces, cold in the corners of each second. Cold so total that it barely had anything to do with physical reality.

Sam hasn't thought about that kind of cold in months, but now he can't stop.

He expects to be cold when Ajay takes his hand, since death is entropy, and entropy is a thief of heat. He isn't.

He expects to be cold when he goes in after Bobby, since it seems impossible to get that close to the Cage without it. He isn't.

He's not cold until Benny turns, smiles,

_the first soul that came was that of my comrade Elpenor_

and there are words on the door, and they are _Love Made Me_, and

the devil doodles on a windowpane and _Yes_ and Sam is gone because he was never complete until _Yes_ and Benny turns, smiles, and says—

Sam lands on his hands and knees.

The ground is soft. Rain patters on moss and bark as the remains of a storm filter down, branch to branch, leaf to leaf, from the remote treetops to the tangled splay of roots. The smell of cool, damp earth is strong in his nostrils.

He looks around. Jess wanted to hike the Appalachian Trail, the whole thing. It had the kind of hold on her imagination that faraway places often do, and she liked to talk about tips she'd read for crossing the Hundred-Mile Wilderness. It was the Appalachian Trail's greatest challenge, she said, the through-hiker's Everest.

At least now he can say he's seen it.

: : :

Sam can't look Dean in the eye.

One year Dean was in that gray, sideways place, getting scoured by combat; he vanquished his enemies and brought his friends out intact. Sam was there a day, and all he managed to do is leave his brother's comrade behind.

When Sam was twelve, he got in a fight with their father. It was over soccer and bow-hunting, he remembers now. He's surprised by how detailed the recollection is. All those memories have seemed so abstract since Hell intervened, such a huge, dampening interval, but lately his personal history is starting to seem vivid again. The bow-hunting fight, he recalls, happened before he learned to shape his rage into barbs that would really penetrate (he'd have his whole adolescence to work on that), and it reduced him to dumb frustration.

It ended with Dean taking Sam off with him to get the groceries just to put distance between Sam and John. Montana, Sam remembers. Small town. Early September. Still hot and dusty, but with that pregnant taste in the air of changing seasons. Sam followed Dean from the little corner store's parking lot towards the entrance, kicking at the gravel, sullen. There was a larger piece mixed in: quartz, white quartz. Sam thought of soccer, thought of his father, felt all the fury he couldn't make roll off his tongue, wound up, and kicked the quartz rock as hard as he could.

He'd aimed it at a plywood sign advertising bait minnows in red spray paint letters. He hit it, in fact, a good kick. Then the rock ricocheted off the wooden sheet and the shop's plate glass door exploded.

The minutes immediately following were something of a blur. Sam remembers stuttering, even dumber than he'd been by the end of the fight with John, and Dean pushing him back into the car before squaring his shoulders and going to deal with the owner. The glass sparkled all over the front walk. Dean and the shopkeeper talked, occasionally gesturing; Sam couldn't hear anything in the car and didn't dare get out, so all he could do was watch Dean's back and the man's face, tanned, lined, impassive. Sam's hands shook.

Eventually Dean came back, got in, shut the door not much harder than usual, and said, bitterly, "You're fucking expensive, you know that?"

Sam trembled the whole way back and for hours afterward. Dean drove without sparing him a glance. Sam didn't dare cry.

It's odd to feel the same shame all over again.

When he and Sam met, Benny smiled a little, glinting smile, like he _knew_, one blood-sucker to another. Just like that, Sam was gone. Rage swept him out to sea, then and every time he's ever thought about the man.

It was odd, really, because Sam can't remember feeling anything with such intensity since before the Cage. He more or less assumed he never would again. Then this hatred, touching down like a meteor. Sam has hated Benny for Amy's sake, and for his own, and, yes, for Ruby's, though he knows he hasn't any right. He's hated him for the cravings Sam had for days after they met, for weeks, when he'd gone months before then without feeling anything that could even be termed an appetite. He's hated him because how was Sam supposed to know (_but he did know_) that the agreement he and Dean had was a non-agreement?

The common thread through all these things is that none of them have really been Benny's fault at all, but Sam has hated him for them, and he's acted on his hatred.

So it's Benny Sam wronged and Benny who saved his ass despite it, but it's Dean he has to face afterward. It's Dean's features upon which he sees the horror and grief spread when Sam stammers out an explanation, and Dean who tries to hide it with a smile and an embrace, and it's Dean he has to sit next to in a car from Maine clear to Kansas.

Traveling half the length of the country in awkward silence. Again. Sam feels wrung out, and the rhythms of the car on the open road are gentle, familiar, and beguiling.

_After him I saw Minos sitting in judgement on the dead._

_After him I saw huge Orion driving the ghosts of the wild beasts he had killed._

_After him I saw Sisyphus at his endless task, raising his prodigious stone with both hands._

_After him I saw mighty Hercules, but it was his phantom only, and the ghosts were screaming round him like scared birds flying all whithers. He spoke piteously, saying, my poor Ulysses, noble son of Laertes, are you too leading the same sorry kind of life that I did when I was above ground?_

"I was never any good up there, anyway."

Sam jerks awake. He blinks several times. He's looking at the Impala's passenger-side window, not Benny.

He draws in a breath and lets it out; he can feel Dean's eyes on him. It's dark again, but he can make out the door to the bunker.

"Hey," says Dean, and his voice is nearly normal again, "we're home."

: : :

The day after they get back from Maine is quiet. They don't talk about Benny. They definitely don't talk about Bobby. Sam reads, and Dean—Dean _putters_. Sam watches him from across the room and realizes that Dean has always had an inclination to putter, only he's never really had the requisite space before. Now he is definitely puttering. Puttering around with boxes he's brought into the library, puttering off for more, puttering into the kitchen, puttering back.

Sam smiles faintly. Dean is a putterer.

At some point, Sam wakes up in one of the armchairs with his finger marking his place in a book and a blanket spread over him. The lights are low, and Dean's still in here, moving quietly in his stocking feet. Sam watches him for long, syrupy moments before peeling himself out of the chair, thinking fuzzily of bed. Dean glances up as he passes, but still says nothing.

Sam passes out face-first on his bed, falling with relief into good, solid exhaustion, the kind that blots out all emotion. He doesn't dream, exactly, but once or twice on the way down to total unconsciousness his mind scrapes on images of Dean's hands, lifting ancient weapons out of the boxes.

: : :

Dean gets weird after Charlie's djinn. He won't stop hovering or watching or circling—except for when he disappears for long stretches, off into the bunker and out on unspecified errands in town. He speaks in monosyllables, coming or going.

Sam, in between working up a rough concordance of the Book of Enoch, feels sorry for himself. There's a buzz at the back of his head that he can't dislodge. He's also managed to swallow a fire that won't even keep him warm, and every time he glances up at Dean, he dreads the impending storm. There's little sign of it as Dean works through piles of artifacts, putters off to the kitchen, comes back to press food on Sam, and returns to the artifacts, all impassively, but Sam knows it's coming.

He keeps an eye on the place where he struck Dean to knock him out, but it barely even bruises.

A few more days elide into each other. Sam can't figure out what they're doing stalled here. They're waiting for word of Kevin, yes, but time was when they'd go out and find something to do in between cases. Text starts to blur together; Sam shuts his eyes and presses the heels of his hands into them. Tangled trees leap up in sharp relief against the insides of his eyelids. They twist, branch out, start to turn to frost. He drops his hands as if burned and opens his eyes.

He takes a deep breath. Dean's left his station at the far library table and there's a smell of cooking, something meaty. Sam's gorge rises slightly.

Dean came back from Purgatory hungry. It's good to see him eat with real gusto again instead of feigned, to relish things, to really _want_ things, even when the things he's wanted have occasionally included Sam's head. Dean went through the motions for so long after Hell that Sam had given up hoping he'd ever see his brother back in the game completely. Certainly he never figured how how to help.

It's weird to think of Dean having a war buddy, but that's more or less what Benny was. Veterans are supposed to come back hollow-eyed and broken, though, and Dean came back from this war—better. More of him behind his eyes. Feral, maybe, but more human for all that than whatever Castiel dragged out of the Pit. Purgatory has done more to restore Dean in a year than Sam has in six (a hundred and eighty-six), and Sam can't help but wonder: what if they'd both gone?

Dean reenters stage left with a tray laden with—Sam's heart sinks—two of everything.

Sam buries himself in the Ge'ez grammar in his hands and gives no sign he's noticed, but Dean comes straight up to him, anyway. He slides the tray onto the table Sam's using, right next to three volumes of irreplaceable scholarship. Sam pretends not to notice.

"Okay, we've got chili and toast tonight. Only the toast might be a little burned, because I did it in the oven, but nesting or not nesting I draw the line at buying a fucking toaster; I refuse to pay money for something that does one thing to one kind of food. Sam. You hearing me?"

Shit. Sam heard him just fine, of course, but he overplayed his absorption in liturgical Ethiopic, and now Dean probably thinks he's deathly ill and is going to—

Dean's hand lands on Sam's forehead, groping and graceless and fucking cold. He frowns. "You're burning up."

That. Dean is going to to that.

The urge to slap Dean's hand away races down Sam's nerve endings; he catches himself, shoves it down. He takes hold of Dean's wrist instead—still harder than necessary, certainly harder than he should while Dean's in fucking mourning, _what the actual fuck is his problem_—and pushes it away. "I'm fine." He lets go of Dean's hand.

Dean's face closes off. "You going to eat this, or what?"

Sam looks at the food. The nebulous dread tightens his throat, tightens his stomach. "Yeah. Of course. Thanks."

Thanks. Yes. Good. A-plus in gratitude, Sam.

Dean eyeballs him a moment longer, a look Sam can't quite identify, then eventually retreats to another table with his portion. Sam stirs the chili around and fakes a few bites.

It's been days, and Dean hasn't so much as spoken Benny's name. His right, Sam knows. He just can't help wishing Dean would get it over with.

: : :

Sam spends half a morning one day considering an apology about Benny. _I'm sorry I left him behind, Dean. I know he deserved better than that, Dean. I'm sorry I let you down, Dean._ Not because he thinks it would work, in the usual sense of soothing the recipient's feelings or winning the suppliant forgiveness; rather because he thinks if he pitches it dewy-eyed and earnest enough, he might finally be able to get Dean to say what he really thinks.

He's not sure what would happen after that, but it would have to be better than this.

: : :

Dean makes: grilled cheese and tomato soup, pancakes, chicken-rice soup, something that's meant to be matzo soup because once twenty years ago John took them to a diner that served it when Dean was sick, actual salads, a slightly expired MRE, chicken soup again. He brings each meal to Sam, rather than standing in the kitchen and hollering for Sam to come and get it, and stands there each time until Sam picks up a fork or spoon. It all smells like roadkill to Sam, even the vegetarian options.

Neither of them has said the word "Purgatory" since they crossed the state line headed out of Maine.

: : :

Sam is twelve years old again, riding next to Dean in silence with a broken shop window in their rearview. Except he's thirty-one (two hundred and eleven), and he's starting to resent feeling twelve.

: : :

It's been weeks. The walls are not merely closing in on him, but flexing, rippling malevolently just out out of sight. Sam knows that they are made of paper and that he could rip them with his hands, but he also knows that if he walked up to them and tried, they'd suddenly play solid, because that is the sort of thing the fuckers do. He's had it with the walls. He is going for a run.

He doesn't avoid Dean on the way out, because he is an adult and doesn't need his brother's permission to go for a quick jog. Still, he's glad to make it out the door without encountering him.

Lebanon is having a cold spring. Sam draws in big lungfuls of cool, humid air while he stretches, then sets off down the access road that snakes around the slope the bunker's built into. Easy surface, easy pace. Just letting his limbs remember how to do this and giving his thoughts somewhere to run other than in circles.

Kansas isn't the greatest place for hill work, but for open air it can't be beat. A macadam lane spurs off from the road to the bunker, joining it to K-191 headed away from town, towards the fields, and this is the route Sam takes. It wraps around the slope and around the bunker, slanting down and away from the shell of the factory on top. Abruptly Sam twists, looking back and up at the blank windows. For a second, he thought he heard something, or maybe saw movement up there, but there's nothing. Probably a bird. He jogs on.

He shakes his hair out of his face with a wet slap. Breathe from the belly. Inhale three steps; exhale two. Mindful breathing. Run better with mindful breathing. Improve your race times, stretch your distances, lighten your mood, clear your mind, lower your cholesterol, revitalize your life, refurbish your bathroom with mindful breathing. At some pont, Sam speds up.

Sam knows that Dean thinks the running is moronic. Had Sam told him it was for training, Dean probably would have accepted it and might even have joined him occasionally, but because Sam does it for health and recreation, Dean acts like Sam has taken up doing pilates on a beach in yoga pants while listening to motivational speakers on tape. Dean, who always used to be the first one out the door when their father was the one ordering six miles before breakfast, now waits in their motel rooms or the bunker to give Sam an ironic look when he comes back sweaty, like somehow just by going for a run Sam is trying to prove something that Dean won't buy, like Sam is _lying_.

It's a flat smear of brown and gray out here, but at least he's out. Dean's got all kinds of plans and projects for the bunker (_A bungalow, Sam? You ditched the life and left me in Purgatory for a chick and a _bungalow_?_), but Sam spends all his time either sleeping or reading, and he's done enough of both lately for a lifetime. It feels good to move again. It even feels good in his lungs, a bit of a burn but cleansing. Some of Dean's contempt for the running thing, Sam thinks, is over the simplicity of it. They're the _Winchesters_; what difference could a quick jog make to the mess in their lives? How dare Sam take comfort in putting one foot in front of the other after everything he's been through and all the shit he's pulled?

Shout somewhere. Farmer, probably. _There had better be something chasing you._ Dean came right out and told him; foolish of Sam to forget it.

What is so bad about taking comfort in this? It isn't a lie, all this serenity crap and talk of acceptance. Sam never said he wasn't angry. It's not like he's trying to hide his true feelings, or white his sepulchre, or whatever it is that Dean's thinking when he gives Sam that faintly disgusted, _knowing_ look. For a while, Sam really did think his anger had died in the Cage, anyway. It took time to learn its new faces. Not that any of that even matters, because the surest route to emotional modification is behavioral modification. People can be happier because they smile, not just smile because they're happy. People can have purpose because they get up in the morning enough times in a row, not just get up in the morning because they have a purpose.

Another shout.

Fake it till you make it. Come on. Dean knows all about that.

Sam looked the first time. Doesn't Dean remember? Sam looked everywhere, including inside every demon he met, and Dean did not thank him for it. But maybe Sam has had it wrong all these years. Maybe Dean would have been just fine with the demon blood thing if only Sam had actually gotten the job done. Benny got the job done, and Dean seemed all right with him.

None of that is why he didn't look this time.

"Sam!"

Sure, Sam's made choices, but he's not the only one. Sure, maybe Benny is the one who's never let Dean down, but has Dean ever stopped to think that maybe, just maybe, that's because in Purgatory, _shit was simpler?_ Sure, Dean says he wants Sam to die old and impotent and human, but Dean has said that before.

Sam sprints. It's an all-out pace that feeds on itself and burns through every resource, faster and impossibly faster. He used to sprint like this at the tail-end of every run, just for a few seconds. Each time he wondered how long he could keep it up. He thinks about a dark and rotting wood and wonders if he could keep it up for a year.

He had his reasons. He had his reasons. He needs Dean to get it, because Sam doesn't.

There's a curse from up the embankment to Sam's left, much closer now. Sam's chest burns like holy fire.

_So tell me, Dean, was he a better brother because he did fuck you or because he didn't?_

"Sam, damn it—!"

_Is it monsters you've got a problem with, or just me?_

"Sam!"

Dean leaps from the embankment. Sam turns into it swinging, but his balance is screwed and they both go down. Dean eats the first blow with his eyes stupidly wide. Gravel grinds into Sam's side as he struggles to get his feet under him. Dean's hands move over Sam's clothes, trying to hang onto him, and Sam bites down on the first piece of Dean that presents itself. Dean howls but doesn't let go. Sam pulls away. Dean wrenches Sam's arm. Sam slams his knee into Dean's groin. Dean rolls them until Sam's under him, and Sam can see he's pissed now. Good.

"Sam, what the goddamned hell—"

Sam answers with a grunt and a spirited attempt to break Dean's nose with his forehead. Dean dodges it and tucks in close, rams his head against Sam's neck, hisses as he yanks Sam's hands up over his head, tearing skin on the gravel. It's a tenuous hold, and Sam breaks it with a single, vicious twist of his body. Dean curses again and grasps at Sam's skin, gets a hold on one of his nipples and digs in with a thumbnail. Sam goes to lash out with his foot, or maybe to punch Dean in the kidneys, or maybe to rip out his throat, but instead something twitches deep in his chest and suddenly he's coughing, over and over, his body curling under the force of it.

Dean's grip loosens. "Sammy?" Sam spits a mouthful of blood into the gravel, rolling away from Dean and onto his side. Dean's hands follow, gone frantic and searching. "Sammy, c'mon, let me—"

Sam comes up under him. One fist connects with Dean's shoulder and grounds against bone. Sam digs his other thumb into Dean's armpit, working it between hair and sweat-slippery muscles until he knows by the sound that's ripped out of his brother that he's found the right place. He grips harder, twists. Dean's not the only one who learned things downstairs.

Sam thinks he's won. He shoves Dean off of him and goes to stand, still coughing, but Dean is right there with him, fist twisted in Sam's tee-shirt, face muddy, panting. It's only then that Sam realizes he's been talking: "Get off me, Dean; Dean, get off me, get off me, get off—"

Dean's face contorts in fury; he shakes Sam once before he lets go. "What the _hell_ are you doing, Sam?"

"I was just going for a run! What the hell are _you_ doing?"

"Bringing you back!"

"Who asked you to?"

"You're _sick_, Sam!"

_"So what!"_

"So what am I supposed to do?"

Breathing hard in the rain, Sam makes himself look at Dean, really look. He's got a canned, pleading expression on his face, but in his eyes is ball-shriveling, pants-shitting terror. For half a second, Sam's glad. Then he realizes that Dean's not afraid of him. He's afraid of what's happening to him. It really is as simple as that. All the hovering, all the cool washcloths and hands on his forehead and soup—it's not some elaborate psychological torture. It's none of the things Sam's invented. It's far worse: it's genuine.

That's when Sam knows that no matter what, he's not going to get the beat-down that he wants. Dean's not angry over Benny. Dean doesn't even blame Sam for leaving Benny behind, because it's not Sam's fault; Sam is _sick_, after all, too fucked up to even hold accountable for his failures. Sam inhales for three counts and exhales for two. He does it again, then again.

"Sam." It's Dean's reasonable tone. "It's cold, it's raining, and you're coughing up a lung. You shouldn't be out here. Hell, _I_ shouldn't fucking be out here."

Sam shifts himself until he can sit back against the embankment, ass in the muddy ditch. Sam examines his knuckles with a sense of unreality. He came close to killing Dean with his bare hands, once. Threw him through the partitions and mirrors and furniture of a honeymoon suite, of all places, and only stopped because it was more satisfying to leave him bleeding on the floor than to finish the job.

Then the world turned out to be even frailer than Dean. Still. It wasn't the world's fragility that made his hands shake for months afterward.

Breathe in for three, breathe out for two.

Gravel crunches as Dean settles gingerly next to him. His tongue probes at his cheek from the inside and he rubs his fingers over the reddish spot where Sam's knuckles landed across his jaw. "That fucking hurt," he says conversationally.

"I meant it to."

Dean snorts, like he isn't pissed off, but he's taut in a way that has nothing to do with any of the bruises Sam just put on him. "When Kevin translated that first part of the spell, man, all I could think was: 'Finally. Finally I know what the hell I'm supposed to be doing.' Like, for the first time since I got back, I had a point."

Sam should, at this juncture, interrupt to tell Dean that his point is to be Dean, but he just isn't in the mood to talk to a wall.

"Dropped the ball on that one." Dean gives a humorless half-smile and sucks on a torn fingernail. "But then I thought, 'Well, okay. Sammy's going to need help, here. I can be the dude who rides along in the golf cart next to the marathon. I can do that.'" He turns to look at Sam. "Only I _can't_, Sam, because you won't fucking let me. Is that really so much to ask?"

"You do realize that I am an adult, right? You have registered this?"

"Well, is it? Are you that dead-set on cutting me out?"

"This isn't about—"

Dean's talking in a rush, like he needs to get the words out before he can stop himself. "Because you know what? I think I've lost enough over the years that I deserve a hand in this thing."

Sam flinches.

"What the hell are you trying to prove, anyway?"

Sam almost hits him again for that; for a moment it's taking all his concentration not to, even as he can feel exhaustion eating at the edges of his anger.

"This whole thing," Dean says. "The Trials. I wanted this to be—" Sam still refuses to look at him, and Dean's face closes off. "Never mind." In his peripheral vision, Sam sees Dean's eyes flick over the countryside, back towards the bunker. "What is the point of this place if you won't let me take care of you?"

Sam rises to it. "I don't know, Dean, what _is_ the point of it?"

That was low, and Sam knows it and doesn't care.

He pushes off from the ground and staggers to his feet with a grunt. He hears Dean following suit beside him, knows without looking that in spite of everything Sam's just said, Dean's hands are outstretched to spot him, and doesn't say, _Do I have to beat you to death to convince you I can walk?_ He doesn't want to beat Dean to death. What he wants is for them both to beat each other into oblivion, but it wouldn't end that way. It never does.

Sam walks a few yards back the way he came, bends over, pukes, straightens again, and looks at the road and fields. It's Purgatory-gray out here. It occurs to Sam only now to wonder what Dean was doing out here in the first place, but it's obviously too late to ask.

_I was never any good up there, anyway._

Sam did warn Dean he might be the hunter to put Benny back where he belonged.

Slowly Sam sets off down the road, back towards the bunker. For a few paces, he hears Dean right behind him; then a moment's silence; then the crunch of a heel twisting on gravel and movement through long, wet grass as Dean returns the way he came across the fields.

: : :

He wakes to Adam screaming.

It's far from the first time, even since Cas sopped up his hallucinations like some sort of spiritual sponge. In the Cage, Michael mostly kept Adam subsumed, and Sam never worked out whether that was to shield him or punish him. Periodically, however, it was like Michael flipped up a window somewhere inside, and suddenly the face pressing through would be Adam's face, and there would be screaming. It hasn't surprised Sam that the sound follows him around with or without the benefit of insanity, but this, right now, is different. The memory of Adam's screaming is usually quite immediate. This sound seems to reach him from far away, and it's that that makes him wonder if perhaps he's really hearing it.

He frees his hands, pushes the covers off, and goes out into the War Room, as Dean enjoys calling it way too much. He pads around in a circle, tilting his head, and then feels really stupid. Even if this is real, it's not like Adam's at the other end of a drainpipe somewhere and he's going to get a better fix on him if he finds the right spot in their living room. Which is a War Room. So he stops pacing, but he doesn't feel like going back to bed, either, so he goes to the kitchen.

They've got bread. Pretty nice bread. Dean bought stuff with some color and bits of oats on the crust. Adam's scream is a long, thin wail that barely sounds human anymore. Sam spreads mustard and tots up how long he's been down there. Long time, now. He puts everything back into the fridge, sits down at the steel counter with his bologna on wheat, and chews, thinking.

There are many reasons why these trials, and the prize at the end, are so important; demons are only a few hundred thousand of them and not the most dangerous. Dean seems to have forgotten that there are still angels who want to haul Michael and Lucifer back up like crabs in a fishing trap and restart the Apocalypse. Sam hasn't. It's been at the back of his brain since Kevin explained about putting Hell out of business, and so, too, has Adam.

He hears a shuffle behind him and glances up to see Dean squinting into the kitchen in a robe. "Sammy? It's the middle of the night, man."

Sam pauses. It's the first he's seen of Dean in—a while. He isn't sure how long. He's been asleep, mostly. Long enough for both of them to scab over and get stiff.

"Sorry," he says finally. He scoots the plate toward Dean. "Bologna?"

Dean stares at him for several seconds. Then he shrugs, enters the kitchen, pulls up a stool, and takes the other half of the sandwich. He bites into it and makes a face. "Dude, how do you screw up a bologna sandwich? Didn't that chick at least teach you how to cook?"

"Amelia? Amelia can't cook to save her soul."

Dean still eats it, though. "Why are you up, anyway? Trial stuff?"

Sam thinks up a way for that to be true and then says, "Yeah."

When they first learned about the Trials, Sam couldn't let Dean take them on because he could see the death wish in him, but that's not the only reason Sam won't give up the wheel. If anybody's going to bury Adam alive, permanently, it's going to be him.

They eat in silence for a few minutes. Sam can't tell for sure if it's awkward or not.

Dean finishes the half of the sandwich Sam thrust on him and belches. One cheek has purpled up where Sam hit him out on the road, but not as much as Sam expected.

"Anything you want to do before the third Trial?" Dean asks. When they finally get the gate shut, they imagine, things will get pretty lively for a while. They've already talked about escape routes, cached emergency supplies, strategized for worst-case scenarios.

Sam considers. "Try to get through the Rosicrucian section of the archives. Henry knew a lot of tricks, and he wasn't even that far along in the Letters' hierarchy. If we knew more about their spellwork, dealing with demons might—"

"Not that. I mean, is there anything you want to _do_?"

"Like what?"

"Like— Like go to the Grand Canyon. We still haven't seen the damned thing. Or do our Vegas trip. Or hit a concert. Something fun."

Sam stares at him. Yeah, sure he wants to. He passed the threshold of suspecting he might not get out the other side of this thing to knowing he probably won't some time ago, and, yes, he wants to do something fun with his brother before the end. He wants one last, perfect memory. Everybody always wants a last, perfect memory.

"There isn't time for that, Dean," Sam says, slowly, like he's talking to a child.

Which pisses Dean off. Sam can see it in his eyes and the way he flushes. "There's enough time for something," he snaps. "Don't lie and say you don't even want to. I want to end this shit at least as much as you do, but we can take a goddamned day off."

"Dean, I swear to God, if you don't quit _nursemaiding_ me—"

"I'm not, Jesus!"

To his own surprise, Sam believes him. That's anger on Dean's face, not guilt at getting caught out. Which is not to say that Dean hasn't been nursemaiding him in general or won't be nursemaiding him some more, but for once this isn't about that. It might be about something far more fatalistic, but Sam can work with that. He wants— He doesn't even know what, anymore. For a while he had himself convinced that all he wanted was to construct a normal, boring life with someone and prove himself human; then Dean came back and uprooted that, everything. Now all he knows is that he _wants_, so he puts a palm on either side of Dean's face and kisses him.

One of Dean's hands fists in Sam's shirt; the other goes to the back of Sam's neck, grasping hard, and he opens his mouth against Sam's. Wow, okay, yeah, Sam can see what Dean meant. Way too much mustard.

They've left the stools they were on behind, barely noticing despite getting tangled in the legs and nearly faceplanting. Sam lets Dean crowd him against the kitchen counter, pulling him in as they go. Adam's still screaming. Dean drops his mouth to Sam's neck, and Sam drops his hands to Dean's waist. Adam's still screaming. That stupid woolen robe Dean likes falls around them, scratchy and musty and sheltering; it hides Sam's hands when he slips them under Dean's sleep shirt, feels Dean's stomach contract when he sucks a breath in, and dips his fingers just under the elastic band of his boxers. Fuck, that gets Dean going. Always has. Started that way. Adam's still screaming. Dean kicks Sam's legs apart and flattens himself against him. Against Sam's mouth, he says, "I bought some stuff, a while back."

"I know," Sam gasps, because Jesus, like anyone in the entire store had missed Dean's jumbo box of condoms, three flavors of lube, or the shit-eating grin on his face.

Dean nips at Sam's lip. "Want to do things to you. All day long. Let me," Dean says. His thigh presses against Sam's hard-on. "C'mon, let me make you feel good."

Adam's wail comes up from Sam's skin, from down where he's supposed to be coming apart. For a moment, it's like he's wearing him. Then it stops.

In the sudden silence, their breaths are harsh and loud. Sam pulls back. He does it gradually, in between kisses and with his hands on Dean's hips, but Dean notices. For several seconds, his eyes flick over Sam's face; then he groans, lets go of Sam's shirt, and thumps a fist against the wall. "Right," he says, tonelessly.

"Dean, it's not…." _Not you_ is of course the remainder of that sentence, and it's sort of true. It's this _place_. Whatever they do in anonymous, interchangeable motels, it doesn't count. Whatever they do in the Impala, it's theirs. But Sam can just imagine what Dean's got planned: taking him apart in here, getting him strung out and begging and exposed, a celebration of excess that nobody does like Dean, and he can't. He's tried rehearsing it in his mind, but even there he can't help but draw back at the threshold every time.

"I know," Dean says without rancor, and he actually smiles, a bit ruefully. "I'd take care of you, you know."

Yes, Sam knows; that's what he's afraid of.

Dean shakes his head and steps back. Sam lets his head fall back against the wall. He's still so hard that it hurts. "I'll leave it alone," Dean says.

"I want to."

Dean snorts. "I know _that_," he says, and Sam feels himself redden. Dean runs a hand through his hair. "Just wish I knew what goes on in there these days."

Oh, that's rich, after Purgatory, after Benny, after everything in the past three years. Anyway, who says they need to share head space on top of cars, rooms, beds, clothes, weapons, ammo, food, drink, first aid supplies, bodily fluids, sometimes women, and eternity?

Dean's looking at him seriously. That is never, ever good. Sam tries not to fidget.

Dean puts a hand to the side of Sam's face, gripping and angling it the way he always has to check Sam over, as if it gives him a better view. Dean touches so much, lately. He's always been tactile, but in the year after Lisa and Ben, he pulled in on himself physically as much as mentally, and Sam became accustomed to the extra space as much as he starved for the touch it replaced. Purgatory brought Dean back half-feral, but vital once again. Alive and touching. Maybe a bit more like an animal communicates with touch than like the brother Sam grew up with, but it's still Dean, just a Dean Sam hasn't known yet. First he touched in anger, then in fear, now in fear mixed with affection and a good, strong kick of shared lust that just won't _die_ no matter how many times they themselves do.

Sam feels the pads of Dean's fingers against his jaw and remembers small things in rapid cascade. He can remember such minutiae lately, can't _stop_ remembering. It's some strange effect of the Trials. The memories come flooding into the cracks between moments until they seem like they'll burst: Dean's hands running restlessly over racks of discount shirts. Dean's hands flicking a lighter. Dean's hands completely red, every vein and sinew highlighted under the sheen of blood. Dean's hands next to the camping lantern the first time he showed Sam how to use a whetstone, months before their dad deemed Sam old enough, and Dean was young himself, maybe nine or ten, but he was already so good at it, could find just the right angle and push the blade along with slow, rock-steady strokes.

Dean's hands on a girl's breasts in the fall of 1998 when for 6 long-short weeks they each sort of had their own room, except for a hole in the wall that Dean _knew_ was there, because they'd both pushed their beds against the shared wall and played cards through the opening when they were supposed to be asleep. Dean's hands through that hole as he laid the girl down on his military-neat bed when he knew Sam would be awake despite pretending otherwise. Dean's hands peeling her sweater up; Dean's fingers slipping under the cups of her bra; Dean's callused, slightly grimy hands on the girl's perfect skin and Sam growing gradually, acutely confused as to which one he found so compelling. Dean's hands traveling down, down, disappearing—and Sam losing it right about then and spending the next hour and a half lying very still with spunk drying in his boxers, because Dean really took his goddamned time that night.

Dean's hands on Sam's body, stitching a wound clamping his carotid jerking his cock. Dean's hands on the steering wheel, the most familiar sight in the world.

Sam shuts his eyes briefly. He's pretty sure he can remember sitting next to Dean in a carseat and _chewing_ on Dean's fingers.

Dean drops his hand and turns away. "Go to sleep, Sam."

: : :

He's pretty surprised when Dean actually sends him into town, like Sam isn't coming apart at the subatomic seams. Come to think of it, Dean's been trying to give him space these past few days, really trying. Trying in that way that makes it impossible not to notice how much effort it's apparently costing him, but, still, trying, and Sam's grateful for it. Maybe a little bit resentful, too, when Dean calls out, "Hey, do a dinner run, could you?" without extracting himself from the chunk of the bunker's plumbing he's working on, because Sam feels like shit and Dean damn well knows it; but even if it's never actually stopped him, at least he _knows_ it's insane to resent people for giving him what he asks for.

Anyway, it's good to get out.

"Hey," Sam calls as he navigates the stairs down to the bunker's main level, "they didn't have any pie, just cobbler…."

He trails off. The library's dark. Not entirely dark; there's a muted glow coming from a structure that wasn't there before, and it takes Sam a few seconds in the dimness with his compromised vision to work out that what it is is chairs, all of the chairs in the library, lined up in rows on either side of the archway that leads to the telescope niche and roofed with woolen Army blankets. The light shows greenish through the crisscross weave of the cloth.

Slowly, Sam crosses the War Room and sets the bag of food down on a library table. There's a thump from somewhere in the impromptu tent, and one of the chairs shifts; then Dean appears at the opening, on his hands and knees, grinning like an idiot. "Hey."

"Hey," says Sam, bewildered.

"What'd you get?"

"Uh." Sam has to think about it for a moment. "Fried chicken and cherry cobbler."

"Awesome. Come on, bring it in here." Dean disappears again.

After a few seconds to verify that he's neither dreaming nor delirious, Sam grabs the food, toes his shoes off, and crawls in.

Dean's cross-legged on the floor under a flashlight hung from a mop handle, and from the self-satisfaction on his face, you'd think he'd just masterminded the Taj Mahal, not a blanket fort. Then again, it is a pretty good blanket fort. "Yeah?" says Dean, raising his eyebrows.

Sam has to sit hunched forward a little, but he spends most of his life doing that. "Yeah," he agrees. He looks around. "You made us a blanket fort."

"Yup." Dean digs into the bag for the chicken.

"Why?"

"Because. Come on, got a surprise for you."

Dean crawls into the niche, and Sam follows. More blankets—not the scratchy Army surplus ones from the Letters' linen closet; the soft, luxurious ones from Dean's bed—are spread under the telescope, and there's a six pack of beer in the corner. Dean reaches up, makes some adjustment, and beckons Sam over. "Have a look." Sam goes, scooting forward on his butt until he can put his eye to the eyepiece.

Stars come flooding into the bunker, and Sam's breath catches.

There are thousands of them. Thousands of stars burning red to gold to white to blue to violet, dazzling in their clarity. He's never seen through a telescope like this one. He's seen captures from super-instruments like the Hubble, everybody has, but seeing it for yourself with ground under your feet is different. Even the little amateur scope Amelia had in Kermit brought a kind of immediacy that pictures never could, no matter the quality. This is like being sucked out into the void, or like the walls have been obliterated.

Finally Sam draws back enough to look at the telescope itself. It, at least, seems real. "You fixed it."

"I did."

"How?"

"Skills. Mad, mad skills."

Sam looks through the telescope again. He doesn't even know where Dean's got it pointed; somewhere towards the center of the Milky Way, clearly. He checks the azimuth and altitude and realizes he's looking somewhere around Cassiopeia. Into the heart of the galaxy.

Sam saw a star once, up close and personal. Well, there are trillions more, and some of them are bigger.

For a while, Sam just looks, not even caring precisely what he's looking at. Then he comes to himself enough to realize that as long as he's hogging the eyepiece, he's the only one who can see this and gets up to grab the book of star charts from the shelf in the corner. "Hang on, let me find something." Sam folds himself up under the telescope again, turns to the Messier tables at the back, and makes several adjustments. The dials turn smoothly under his fingers, and somewhere up there, a mirror Dean installed rotates on flawless bearings Dean replaced. He has to go slowly, fighting the tremors that never quite go away anymore and careful of straining the telescope's complicated light collection system, but if he can find this, it'll be worth it.

He finds it. He spends a few minutes getting the image as good as he can, and several seconds just staring. Then he gets out of the way. "All right. Have a look at this."

Dean takes his the eyepiece, and there's a silence as he frowns into the telescope. Sam can see the exact moment on Dean's face that the penny drops. "Dude. Is that—?"

"A giant fucking galaxy? Yeah."

When he turns to Sam, Dean's eyes are as big as they were the first time their father roused them out of bed to see a meteor shower when they were kids. "Which one is it?" he demands.

"Messier object 64. I don't know the NGC designation. They call it the Evil Eye." Sam presses into the few inches Dean left to look once more. M64 blooms in a sparsely populated starfield like a strange, pale rose. He can feel Dean's breath on his ear. "It's actually two galaxies that collided. They think it's spinning one way in the middle and the opposite direction on the outside."

"How far away is it?"

"_Far_."

"Jeebus."

"Yeah."

"Is Jupiter out? Can we see Jupiter?"

"Dean, I'm pretty sure we could see the Great Red Spot pick its nose with this thing."

So they eat fried chicken and cherry cobbler and look at the universe. They do find Jupiter, though Sam can't get the greatest focus. They use the Letters' star charts, Dean wraps one of the blankets around Sam's shoulders, and they just sort of poke around, seeing what they can see, trying to get used to navigating the night sky with an instrument this powerful.

Eventually the stars grow dim. There's been a front moving in from the south; at first the humidity just drew a veil over their view, but now the clouds are crowding the sky, and reluctantly they close the aperture up at the top of the shaft and square the telescope away. Dean lies on his back on the duvet and belches; Sam toys with the hand-written astronomer's diary from the shelf. The last entry is in fountain pen and a beautiful script, dated 1951. After a moment, Sam fishes out a ballpoint and makes his own entry: _Corrected fault in periscope mechanism. Observed: Messier 64, Jupiter, Virgo Supercluster, Messier 13. May 1, 2013._ His handwriting looks odd, next to what comes before it. But not too odd.

Sam lies down next to Dean, gazing up at the telescope where it vanishes up into darkness. Dean looks over at him. "Bed?" he asks. "Or you going to stay up all night reading again?"

They're a foot apart, but Sam can _feel_ Dean. It's the same kind of buzzing tug as when they used to take turns in the backseat of the Impala holding a finger between each other's eyes—half an inch away, not touching and yet felt as some kind of anticipatory neurological ghost. Sam feels it all along his side, like trailing fingers, and somehow he knows that this is the last chance he's going to get. There will be no other moment that's right before the end, so if he wants what Dean's been trying to give him, over and and over ever since they got here, now is the time to man up and take it.

He pushes himself up onto his elbows. It hurts, a deep, flu-like ache in his muscles. In the half-light from the flashlight dying out in the blanket fort, he sees Dean's nostrils flare. "Bed," Sam says, and kisses him.

For several long moments, Dean just lets him. He lies there with his hands at his sides, responding but not pushing. Sam's watched Dean with women (Dean's let him watch, Dean's made sure he's watching, Dean's watched him watching), and this is how he is with them. Pliant, agreeable, giving. Dean's a dog until he gets them into bed and a gentleman once he does. Sam's the opposite, and they both know it. But that's with other people. With anyone else, they're reliable. They can try to hold onto those familiar patterns with each other, but sooner or later there's always a switch that flips, somewhere deep down, and then all bets are off.

Dean bites down Sam's lip without warning, effectively pinning him without raising a hand. Sam can feel him tonguing at the portion he's seized and resists the instinct to draw back, because though Sam has to be crushing him, Dean's teeth aren't going anywhere even if Sam himself does. Sam digs his thumbs into the muscle over Dean's hipbones. Still not bothering to use his hands, Dean kicks Sam's ankles apart, gets his knees between Sam's, and works his legs open.

Blood flows warm to Sam's groin.

Finally Dean flips them. He lets go of Sam's lip to seal his mouth over Sam's jugular and do something amazing with his lips. Before he can stop himself, Sam wonders if Dean learned that from Benny, and apparently thoughts like that still have the power to piss him off because he bucks up hard under Dean, half to struggle, half to get friction on his cock. Dean grinds down in response, rutting them across the floor. Sam feels fever fraying the edge of his senses, sees the blanket fort ceiling in discontinuous frames, drags short nails hard across Dean's shoulders.

Mahogany hits Sam's head. Chair leg. Dean's fumbling at Sam's belt and pressing his face into his neck, muttering _let me, let me_, and arousal and dizziness wash over Sam in one wave. He slips his hands under Dean's shirt to feel the muscle working over his back and lets his head fall back under the smell of sweat and aftershave that hits him like a punch. Half the world smells like rotting meat lately, but Dean smells alive.

Sam rolls them away from the chair and comes out on top. Dean's body is lost in shadow, just the broadest strokes highlighted in the flashlight's dull gold and the glitter of his eyes. Sam shakes his head to try to clear it and squeezes his thighs hard around Dean's hips while he gets his teeth under the line of Dean's jaw. Palms on Dean's sternum, knees on either side of Dean's pelvis, Sam's got the position of advantage, one of the few basic holds that should be nigh unbreakable if you do it right, and he's so busy feeling Dean under him that he barely registers Dean's fingers skimming under his loosened belt until he hears a distinctive _snick_.

He goes completely still. Dean's got Sam's knife open under his shirts. Sam has enough time to register that and to try to stop breathing entirely, and then Dean runs it up, parting two layers of cloth like they're nothing and slicing just once along Sam's breastbone, thin and shallow as a papercut.

Sam stares at the ruined shirts now hanging off him. "You asshole."

Dean smirks. "Told you I'd pay you back."

"I liked that shirt!"

"Yeah, well, I didn't." Then Dean's head tilts, and the flat of the knife slips down, over Sam's skin, smearing the tiny line of blood on his sternum. Sam watches. "Like that, Sammy?" With his other hand, Dean reaches into Sam's open jeans and squeezes his erection through his boxers, slow and deliberate. He lets the outside curve of the blade run over Sam's belly, and rotates his wrist slightly to let the needle-sharp point prick into the skin, just above his groin. Sam presses his eyes shut. "Yeah. You like that."

"Dean." Sam can hear the strain in his voice.

The blade traces cool lines over Sam's torso. "Could give you a haircut," Dean says conversationally.

Sam's fingers clutch at Dean's shoulders; he's trying to hold himself steady, but his arms are trembling. "Dean," he tries again, more petulant than he'd intended.

"You keep this thing sharp, man, I'll give you that." Dean runs the flat of the knife down Sam's obliques, carefully keeping the edge away from Sam's shiver. The blade is curved, talon-like, meant to be pulled rather than thrust. It's Sam's all-purpose emergency knife. Good for cleaning fish, working into small spaces, and cutting ligatures of all kinds. If you're going to use it in a fight, it's a blade shape for severing tendons or disemboweling. Eyes on the metal, intent, Dean settles the blade until the curved edge is fitted against Sam's bare side. Sam's so hard it hurts.

"_Dean_," Sam says, and this time it means, _my arms are burning and I'm going to fall_. There's a moment where Dean stares unblinking at the knife. Then Dean seems to hear him; he snaps the knife closed, casts it away, and puts his hands on Sam's shoulders, warm, holding him up. Just for a second, Sam thinks he feels Dean's hands shake.

"Come on," Dean says, and Sam climbs off of him clumsily, hating how rubbery his limbs feel. He crawls back out into the darkened library and he and Dean pull each other up and fumble their way towards the door, swearing when they find a table or column with their bare feet. Walking would be easier, really, if Dean would stop shoving his tongue down Sam's throat.

They end up in Sam's room, probably because all of Dean's bedding is in the blanket fort. Sam finds the light switch and backs straight up to the bed, pulling Dean down with him.

"Fuck's sake, Sammy." Dean strips off the remains of Sam's shirts and yanks down his jeans. "Are you planning on moving in anytime soon?"

Sam glances around. The walls are bare, the bedding is the same as it was the day they got here, and his gear is ready to go beside the door. Boxes of materials that were in the way in the archives have wound up in here, along with the odd reference volume. There's a bowie knife on the nightstand and a sleeping bag stowed under the bed. He's unpacked more in some hotel rooms.

This is Dean's first time having a room of his own; Sam hasn't had one since Stanford. Sophomore year, he won the housing lottery for a coveted single. He'd carefully observed his classmates' habits the year before, and though he was pretty broke, he equipped himself with a batiked cloth for the ceiling, a Death Cab for Cutie poster he never really looked at, and a discreet locker to hide the weapons he'd kept with him. In the end, he barely spent any time there.

"Yeah," he says. "Soon." He sets to work on Dean's belt buckle to avoid follow-up questions.

He gets Dean down to his boxers and would keep going, except that Dean's hands catch around his wrists. Dean's mouth is suddenly gone from his, and Sam blinks, shaking his hair from his eyes. He tries to move his hands back to Dean, but they're held fast. Dean grinds against him with his hair disarrayed and his pupils blown, and he grins slowly when he feels Sam respond. Dry-humping like teenagers shouldn't feel this good. Maybe it's because they grew up sparring against each other that nobody else has ever known when and where and how to press in quite the same way.

"You going to let me, Sam?"

Need and apprehension make a potent mix. "Yeah."

Dean takes both Sam's wrists in one hand, spreads the other on Sam's thigh. "You sure?" It's gratifying to hear the catch in his voice.

"Well, I mean, I'll understand if you're not _up for it_." Sam rolls his hips; Dean's not the only one who knows tricks. "I mean, a lot of guys start to lose potency when they get on in years."

"Oh, my God, fuck you," Dean says, and pulls Sam's underwear off.

Sam sucks Dean's tongue into his mouth and pushes Dean's boxers down off his hips and that's all he wants, really, just to eat at Dean's mouth and have Dean's cock in his hand for the rest of ever, but Dean's a controlled kisser, combining science and natural talent and answering every desperate motion with a deliberate one, and why does he have to be so good at this?

Naked finally. Dean settles over him. "Jesus, you're hot," he mutters. "And I don't mean that in a who's-your-daddy kind of way, I mean it in a whose-nuclear-reactor-did-you-swallow way." Doesn't seem to be stopping him, fortunately. Sam feels his fingers between his thighs, pressing and stroking and slightly rough. "Condoms?" Dean asks.

"Um." It takes Sam a second to make his brain work. "I think you've got them all in yours."

Dean groans and pounds a fist into the mattress. "Seriously, Sam?"

"I didn't think I'd need my own supply, okay? You bought, like, six hundred!"

"And I stashed them in _every room but this one_. Goddamn it. I was going to fuck you in every room of this place, before—" The mental picture has Sam grabbing at Dean's ass. "Yeah, fuck that," Dean gasps.

"You put it in me bare and I'm not sucking you off for a week."

"Okay, I'll suck _you_ off for a week."

Dean rolls to one side and starts digging at the gap between the mattress and the bed frame. Sam shakes hair out of his eyes. "What're you looking for?"

"Lube. Come on, come on, I know you've got lube—"

Sam remembers a second too late why Dean mustn't look under the mattress and starts to sit up. "No! It's— Don't, I'll get it—"

Dean goes still, but it's not because of Sam. After a moment, Dean unfreezes. He reaches over Sam to the other corner and pulls out what he finds.

It's a length of braided cord, cotton, strong, about a quarter inch thick, ends whipped, neatly coiled with one end secured to the bedpost. The other attaches to a leather cuff lined in canvas. The cuff matches the one Dean found on the other side of the mattress.

Dean lays the cuffs on the mattress and looks at them. All expression has left his face, and Sam knows that he has not misunderstood why they're where. If he had, he'd already be grinning and making cracks about Sam being a kinky bastard. He isn't.

"It's not— I can always get out of them," Sam says. "I always make sure I can get out of them."

Dean studies the cuffs for a long time, then looks over at Sam. For a second Sam's terrified that he's going to ask where he got them, but all he asks instead is, "Does it help?"

Sam turns his face away and nods, miserably.

"Hey." Sam's got his eyes shut, but he feels Dean's fingers in his hair, turning his head. "Hey, come on." Sam blinks his eyes open and masters his face. Humiliation burns worse than the fever, but now that the shock's worn off, Dean's looking at him steadily, and Sam can't see any judgment. "If it helps, it's good."

"Yeah," Sam says mechanically.

Dean turns one of the cuffs over in his hands, studying it for long moments like it's a complex machine and he's sussing out its mechanical principles. Then he holds it up questioningly. "Will you let me…?"

Sam's pulse pounds in his neck. "Yeah. Yeah, okay."

Dean ties him down. He unbuckles the cuffs and wraps them around Sam's wrists and it would help, it would really help, if he wouldn't be quite so gentle about it. The cuffs are cool on Sam's skin when the buckles go down. After a moment to study his handiwork, Dean makes a dissatisfied face, unties the ligatures from both the bedposts and the cuffs themselves, and ties them into a big loop. He makes a lark's head with one end through both cuffs and then ties the other around the center rung of the headboard, drawing Sam's wrists together up above his head. He looks down. "You'll tell me if you need out?"

Sam swallows and nods. He wasn't lying; he can get out of these, positioned as they are, and he could snap the cotton cord securing them if he had to, but whether he'll remember as much once Dean starts in is another question.

"Comfortable?"

Sam nods again. His wrists are fastened close together, but the cord connecting them to the headboard has slack. He can't leave the bed, but he can move around a good deal on it.

"Good. Now, where the fuck _do_ you keep your lube?"

"Dresser, top drawer, left side."

"Of course you do," Dean mutters, rolling off the mattress. "It makes no fucking sense, so of course you do."

His feet slap on the bare floor, and for the first time, Sam feels the chill of the room. What climate control the Letters put in here is meant for preserving their archives, and that means cool and dry; Sam shivers and feels his fine hairs stand at attention. Dean comes back with the lube, tosses it on the bed. Sam expects him to follow. He doesn't.

Looming over him like this, Dean isn't anybody's nursemaid. He's the thing that killed its way out of Purgatory and came up ready for more. Sam's tried so hard to civilize himself over the years that it should bother him, really, that it's times like these that he's surest they're really brothers.

Dean just looks. He looks his fill and takes his time, and his gaze feels more dangerous than the knife. They'd both gone half-soft when Dean found the cuffs and all their momentum went out the window, but lying here strung up and exposed, Sam feels the blood running back; and the fact that Dean's here to see him get hard over being laid out like this is burning humiliation; and the humiliation itself makes him harder and he has to look anywhere but at Dean. He swallows and looks at the ceiling.

"Nope." Springs creak; Sam's eyes drop back down to Dean before he can stop them. Dean's climbing back onto the mattress and up Sam's body. He drapes himself over Sam without bothering to hold himself up, looks him in the eye as he gives both their cocks a hard stroke, and chafes Sam's arms almost absentmindedly where the fine hairs are pricked up in the chill. It does Sam's head in that Dean can seem this predatory and this protective all at once. Dean tugs gently on Sam's hair and kisses him while he slots a thigh between Sam's. Then he grabs the lube and pulls back just enough to open the cap with his teeth. "I'm gonna make you love this place as much as I do. Open up."

A sick, heavy pulse of arousal goes through Sam, and he lets his knee fall to one side under Dean's hand. "I do love this place."

"No, you don't, you just think it's good." Slick fingers press at Sam's entrance, not that gently. "But I am going to personally ensure that at least one memory from here makes it onto your greatest hits list."

It takes Sam a moment to take Dean's meaning. This is maybe because Dean is stabbing lube into his ass with a finger that's just this side of painful. Dean's not giving him much prep—a couple of fingers and a good squirt of lube, just enough to make sure he'll be able to get in. Sam knows what Dean's already respectably sized cock can feel like if he's not ready, if it's been a while and they've just finished a bad hunt or maybe a good hunt and there just isn't time for long, lazy minutes opening Sam up. Now they've got the time, but Dean's plowing ahead like he wants Sam to feel him, like he wants to be sure it's overwhelming. "Ego much?" Sam says when he finally gets it.

Dean smiles in a way Sam's seen him smile at their quarries and pushes Sam onto his side. "Like the man said,"—A hand slides up Sam's thigh, lifting his knee.—"it ain't bragging if it's true."

He hears Dean slicking himself up and then he's there at Sam's back, pushing against him, breath hot and wet against Sam's shoulder blade and _fuck_. Sam breathes out. He's been on the edge for so long, and now that Dean's finally pushing forward, it's too fast and not fast enough. All that these shallow, sideways thrusts are doing is winding him tighter. "Dean," Sam says, but then bites down on the sentence.

One arm wraps around Sam's front. Dean more or less bottoms out. "That feel good?" he says into Sam's ear.

Sam has to roll his eyes. "Yeah, Dean," he says, "it feels like rainbow sparkles and magical unicorn handjobs—"

Without warning, Dean hauls Sam tight back against himself and flips them. One moment Sam's lying on his side, looking at the wall; the next he's lying on Dean, looking at the ceiling.

"How about this?"

Sam chokes on an expletive. This? This feels like being impaled. Like this, Dean feels huge, too deep, and inescapable. As he shifts Sam's upper body and flexes his own muscles to settle into a more stable position, Sam can feel every shift and inelegant wriggle communicated straight through Dean's cock and into his ass. Dean's hand runs over Sam's hips, flattening over his stomach. His legs are braced outside of Sam's, giving him control more total than if he'd bound Sam spread-eagle. Dean plants his heels into the mattress and thrusts up once, and Sam feels it in his spine. He makes a noise. If he bites his lip much harder, he'll break skin.

"Always wanted to try that," Dean gasps out. He thrusts up, kisses sloppily at Sam's neck, thrusts again, and starts up a rhythm.

The sensation is overwhelming and as weird as it is intense. Dean pierces up into Sam's body, but doesn't withdraw when he comes down, can't; cradled by Dean's thighs and with Dean's arm holding him flush against Dean's front, Sam has nowhere to go, no leverage, nothing to do but feel it. Dean won't touch him and Sam can't get control of his tongue enough to ask him to. He's crushing Dean, there's no way he isn't, but Dean keeps coming, breathing deep under the weight of him and lifting them both off the bed with the power in his legs.

Fingers travel over Sam's face and tangle into his hair; the angle rules out a kiss, but Dean presses Sam's head to one side so he can seal his mouth over the spot under his jaw. He tugs at Sam's hair. "You grow this out any longer and I'm going to tie you to the bed by it."

Sam makes an embarrassing noise.

"Come on, Sammy," Dean pleads, rolling his hips. "Help me out here. Come on. Tell me what I feel like."

Sam screws his face up and turns his head to one side, away from Dean's face but into his palm, still there, stroking his hair back. Dean's other hand rubs circles into his stomach, almost soothing but covering nothing. Sam feels the air on him everywhere and Dean's pointier bits digging into his back and Dean's hips pressed tighter against him than he thought possible. He feels pierced through and way more exposed than he thought he was signing on for.

This is payback for something, but Sam's too spoiled for choice to want to try to guess what.

"Come on." Dean's fingers finally wrap around Sam's cock, but not to touch him the way he needs; instead they're feeling him just to feel him. "Took me forever to get you like this; want to hear you tell me."

Sam blinks at the flat white of the ceiling, divided in two by the cord running up from his hands, while Dean rubs a thumb over the head of his cock and cradles his face with a grip that's far too gentle, and _this is what I was afraid of, Dean, this is why I held out_, but Dean is going to win this one, he already knows.

"I know what you want, Sam." Dean's voice is low in his ear. "You want me to pull your stupid hair or scratch you up or beat on you somehow. I'm not going to. Just… just tell me how it feels."

Sam breaks. "Good, okay?" It does. It feels like something has a fist in his belly, twisting, yet it's good, and Dean knows it perfectly well. "Why do you have to—" He makes an inarticulate sound in the back of his throat and bites at one of the cuffs and into the skin below it, hard and desperate and with a cry building behind his tongue.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa, easy! Shit, Sam!" Dean's fingers pry his wrist out of his mouth; Sam groans and drops his head back onto the pillow. Dean rubs at the bite. "Shit. Ease up, Sam. Ease up. We've got a ways to go."

Dean's still fucking him and Sam's still in this place where coming feels as unattainable as it does imperative and he is going to kill Dean, if he survives this. "How long, exactly?"

Almost meditatively, Dean pulls on Sam's balls. "Dunno. Depends on you. I'll know it when I see it."

Meaning he wants to see Sam beg, probably. Sam just about wants to, but he can't, no fucking way. So instead he asks, "What's it feel like for you, then? You're the one hung up on dirty talk."

Dean stutters in his rhythm for a moment; then Sam feels the press of his nose against his shoulder, hears him breathe in. "Tight. Hotter than forty Hells, and I'd know. Like the heaviest, bitchiest, mankiest blanket of my life. Pretty awesome, basically." He wraps both his arms around Sam's middle like he's hugging him, stretches his legs out alongside Sam's. Then, because no matter how exposed, stripped down, snot-nosed and tongue-tied he gets Sam, Dean will never be satisfied, he works his feet between Sam's, hooks his ankles up and over, and stretches Sam's legs wide, holding them open with his own. He makes a short stab up against Sam's prostate that's like licking a battery.

"Ask me to get you off." The strain in Dean's voice isn't much comfort. Sam swallows, says nothing.

Like this, Dean can't fuck him as hard, but he's already in so deep that the constant, rippling thrusts he does make still add to the pressure building at the base of Sam's cock every time. "Ask me to get you off, Sam."

Sam shuts his eyes, tries to shut everything out except the orgasm that's just out of reach, but can't. He's too exposed; he can feel every shift in the air or in Dean's breath. "I don't think I can get off." What he wants is for Dean to grab the blanket and cover them. If he could just get covered he'd be able to come, but he won't say that aloud. He won't.

One of Dean's hands slips down, underneath Sam's body and up between his legs. Sam sucks in a breath when he feels the brush of his fingers where they're joined. "Ask me to get you off in your bedroom in our goddamned home."

"Dean."

"Ask me."

Sam grits his teeth. "Dean. Please, okay?"

Dean lets out a long-suffering sigh. "Close enough for now."

Then Dean's wrapping a hand around him, planting his heels and driving up, covering Sam's cock with the warmth of his palm and ditching the chitchat. Sam can finally, finally get somewhere. Dean jerks him as if he were jerking himself—Sam knows; he's seen it, studied it—using the slack of the foreskin, squeezing on the way up, pushing his thumb into the frenulum and driving up and in. Blood pounds in Sam's ears. He feels himself say Dean's name without hearing it. There's that particular hitch in Dean's breathing, the sweetest sound in the world. For a second after he comes, Dean falters in his rhythm; but he's good to Sam and keeps his grip and works him faster until Sam can finally let go.

The pent-up urgency bursts, falls, rakes its claws through him a couple of times on the way out, and slides away. Sam's left with a sore ass and a chestful of cooling come.

After a minute, Dean groans underneath him. "Jesus, you're heavy."

Sam could do something about that, like lever himself courteously up and off, but Dean's the one who put them in this position and lumpiness notwithstanding, Sam doesn't feel much like moving. "Satisfied, now?" he says.

"Never." Dean smacks him right on a nipple, and laughter edges into his voice. "Hey, Frodo. Told you I could carry you."

Sam groans. "Get out of me, you nerd."

"No."

That requires a moment to process. "Uh. Any particular reason why not?"

Dean's brings a hand up to Sam's pelvis, stilling him preemptively and rubbing at Sam's hip with his thumb. "Not done yet."

"Seem pretty done to me."

"Have a little faith, Sammy. Remember the plan?"

"Plan?" Sam says blankly.

The hand on his hip tightens, though Sam hasn't moved. "Yeah. The one where you let me do things to you all night long. Breaking in the new pad."

Sam hadn't actually forgotten, but he'd kind of envisioned breaks between rounds.

Dean's other hand skates up Sam's body, and—Jesus fucking Christ, Dean is _scooping up Sam's come_. His cooling, half-coagulated come. That is just nasty. Nasty, repulsive, not even a little bit sexy, and is Dean seriously holding that hand up because he expects Sam to lick it clean?

"Dude. I'm not eating that," Sam says, incredulous.

"Why not? You eat mine all the time." The smug _and you love it_ goes unspoken.

This whole time, Dean has been using the come-eating issue to distract Sam from the fact that he's been sneaking his other hand back towards Sam's crotch, and now he's tickling Sam's perineum and playing with his balls. Dean is a stupendous asshole. Dean is a stupendous asshole with a short life expectancy. "You _know_ I hate that stuff when it cools down," Sam says, and promptly goes beet red, because Dean does know, but Sam's never had to come out and say it before.

Dean tries to shrug, but he can't with two hundred pounds on top of him. That's sort of satisfying, at least. "Fine, I'll eat it."

"You are not— Oh, good God. You are."

Dean sucks noisily on his fingers, just because his mouth is near Sam's ear and he can. Sam can feel Dean's cock twitch in him. "Mmmmm, good."

"You are disgusting." Sam isn't sure if his disbelief is for how grotty this has suddenly gotten or for the fact that his own dick is slowly coming back to life. Dean's hand returns to Sam's chest to rub the remaining semen he didn't get into Sam's skin. "I hate you," Sam says with feeling.

"You fucking love me, because without me you would never have any sex marathons."

Irritation is all the more intense when it comes with a burgeoning hard-on and your brother's cock stiffening in your ass. "I'm not a monk, Dean." Sam clenches deliberately around him to make his point.

"No, you're a freak, between the sheets and everywhere else. But one thing you have never learned to do"—Dean thrusts experimentally.—"is to take your damned time." He tangles his legs with Sam's and rolls them back onto their sides; the room tilts around Sam for a moment, the way it so often does lately, and Dean curls into him and gives his cock a coaxing pull. "Come on, man. We've finally got a place of our own, finally. Let's take our time."

Sam shuts his eyes to try to get the better of his strung out senses and fucked up depth perception. Does part of Dean really still think sex can solve anything? Sam pulls away, feels Dean's half-hard cock slip from his body, turns within the confines imposed by the tie on his wrists, and presses his lips against Dean's. Dean slings a leg over Sam's waist and kisses him back.

"What exactly am I letting you do?" Sam asks, several minutes later.

"Get you off as many times as I possibly can." Dean runs a hand up to where Sam's hands are bound and useless over his head and sucks a bruise into the underside of his arm.

Sam lets a breath out. "Yeah, okay."

He hides it quickly, but for an instant Dean looks surprised. Then he goes in for another kiss. It's awkward with Sam's bound wrists between them, so Dean pushes his arms up over his head and wraps Sam's fingers around a slat in the headboard. Obediently Sam holds on and watches the top of Dean's head as it moves down his body, slices of his face, the muscles in his shoulders. Come's leaking out of his ass, slippery between his cheeks. At some point he stopped feeling cold; now he feels warm, hot, even. Dean mouths at Sam's chest while he plays with Sam's cock, the dark smudge of his lashes brushing over Sam's skin.

"Why are you doing this, Dean?"

Sam was only thinking aloud, but now that he's said it, it seems imperative that he know. Though Dean doesn't agree, if his glare is anything to go by. "Because I really like sex, Sam."

"That's not what I mean."

Dean makes a fist, nearly pounds it into Sam's torso, but catches himself, releases it and groans. "I thought we were fucking here, Sam. _Fucking_."

"Who said anything about not fucking?"

"It's sex, Sam. It doesn't have to be some mystical fucking journey."

"Thought you were all about the fucking journey."

"You're not going to let me suck you off in peace, are you?"

"Was just curious," Sam says, staring up at the ceiling. Holding his head up has gotten surprisingly tiring.

"Yeah, whatever," says Dean, and swallows Sam's cock.

Sam knew it was coming, but Jesus. He jerks up, an automatic reaction to try to get away, but it only thrusts him further into Dean's mouth. He's oversensitized, and Dean is not screwing around here. It's almost painful, except that Sam has an understanding with pain. This is both better and a whole lot worse.

Dean is direct. Reserves of teasing are still there, Sam suspects, but for now his approach—swirling his tongue, sucking hard, twisting one hand over the base—is geared almost scientifically toward the production of overwhelming sensation, quite possibly because Dean knows, too well, better than anyone else on Earth, that it isn't actually the fastest way to make Sam come. If anything, it sends his body into revolt; he's perfectly willing to come, he'd _love_ to come, but Dean's tongue working back and forth over the slit makes a pleasure that's too bright, too sharp. When did he hand his brother weapons like that? Sam blinks sweat from his eyes. When he looks down, Dean's watching him. He's got one of Sam's legs over his shoulder, a hand digging into the inside of Sam's thigh; his mouth is stretched wide around Sam's cock and his face is smeared with spit and his cheeks are flushed and he is looking right at Sam. Not for the first time, Sam has a vision of Dean as he must have been in Hell under Alistair's tutelage, and then he comes.

The noise that comes out of his mouth is like someone dying. Sam knows. Dean gets it all and sucks at the tip, tonguing hard at the slit before he pulls off.

"That sound right there. That's why."

Sam blinks. Dean's face is above his; then Dean's tongue is in his mouth, shoving into every nook to make sure Sam tastes himself around the lingering flavor of cobbler and fried chicken. What, is Dean on a mission to make sure Sam eats his own spooge, or something?

Sam feels spent, but Dean's not slowing down. The heat of his erection is solid against Sam's hip as Dean kisses him and rubs himself, leisurely, against Sam's body; and, okay, maybe it isn't fair to ask why Dean's doing this, because Sam would like to try this with their positions reversed, sure. He'd like to have Dean strung up, trying to look tough while Sam makes him lose his mind. He'd like to see the pallor of him gradually stain with red, watch his hands twitch for weapons he knows wouldn't save him, fling an arm over his face to bury his curses in, and finally _break_, just for Sam. Some part of him wants this, too: to be taken to those extremes, to be broken down just to see what's left, and even, yes, to be taken care of. But how can he? Doing it's one thing; letting it happen is another.

The varnished wood under Sam's fingers is damp with sweat. "If you let me out, I could touch you," Sam says. There. That's not begging; that's just good sense.

Dean pauses—God, his shoulders are good to look at, freckled and slightly tan and muscled just right—and looks down at Sam. "Do you need out?"

If Sam says yes, he'll be out in two seconds at most. "No."

Dean grins. "Nah." He scoops up Sam's limp cock, watches him flush with embarrassment, squirts lube over both of them and holds Sam against himself as he thrusts. It feels weird to be wrapped up against Dean's erection when Sam himself is completely soft, humiliating and perversely sexy and almost invasive, the way the head of Dean's dick under his foreskin in the shower had been. Soon Sam's stiffening up again, albeit not very fast.

"I will never get tired of watching you like this," Dean says quietly, still dragging them together.

Watching him how? Embarrassed and trying to hide it? Embarrassed and unable to hide it? Turned on? Sick and weak? Covered in marks Dean put there? Tied to a bed? Tied to a bed in a place Dean calls home?

"I do believe in this place," Sam says on impulse. He thinks primarily of the bunker as the site of a great library and the place where Dean will willingly undress for bed. Neither is a small thing. He doesn't feel like the heir to the Letters' knowledge, or to this bedroom, or like any of this was meant for him, specifically, but he's okay with that. There have been a handful of things he knew in his gut were meant for him, and none of them have been good. "I think it could really mean something. With what we know and what's in these archives—there could be a different kind of life here."

Dean smiles. For a moment, Sam thinks he sees what a thousand monsters in Purgatory saw right before the end. "Yeah, Sammy. Of course you do."

Sam's angry and bewildered. "What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

Instead of answering, Dean bends to tongue at the cut on Sam's sternum, raising a thin, bright line of pain, and _now_ Sam's hard. His skin burns. In a room that's suddenly grown dim, Dean is golden and lithe as he crouches over Sam's body and takes his cock in his mouth again. What's it matter whether there's a different kind of life as long as Sam can't stop wanting this one?

Dean shuts his eyes and licks him, just draws his tongue up Sam's cock over and over and makes this slightly satisfied noise at the back of his throat. God alone knows what does or doesn't make it upstairs, but that sight won't be leaving Sam for a long time.

Dean blows him almost impatiently, moving like he can't decide where to put his mouth or which reactions he likes better: the aborted, strung out little jerks of Sam's hips when Dean flicks his tongue over the head, or the deep breaths he takes when Dean swallows him entirely. Finally Dean pulls back, and Sam bites back a sound of mingled frustration and relief. "You always—" Dean feigns casualness, rubbing his thumb over the crown of Sam's erection and kicking his heels in the air. Sam watches him start to say something and then discard it. Instead, he reaches around the side of the bed somewhere and comes up with the lube again.

"How many times do you think I can make you come, Sammy?"

Sam grits his teeth. "Zero, if you don't get the fuck on with it."

"There's an idea. Could tie you up properly and just leave you here." Dean goes back to his blow job, this time with focus. Lubed-up fingers press at Sam's entrance; Sam almost scrambles to spread his legs, not even bothering to try to do otherwise, and he can hear Dean laughing around his cock.

One finger sets up a rhythm massaging prostate; two fingers are good; three fingers and Dean's gorgeously sloppy mouth are fucking fantastic, and before he knows it Sam is panting and arching up and so ready to dive off the brink, but suddenly Dean's fingers clamp tight in a ring around the base just to make sure he can't.

"You fucking asshole," Sam gasps.

Dean pops Sam's cock out of his mouth, looks up his body, and says, "What's this about assholes?"

"Fuck you."

"Yeah, maybe."

The heat of Dean's mouth is gone, but his fingers are still moving in and out, and Sam makes a helpless noise as he presses back onto them. "What do you want?"

"I already told you." The laughter in Dean's voice is almost, almost worth this. "I want to make you come"—Quick suck.—"as many times as I can"—A tug at Sam's pubic hair.—"in"—Thrust of his fingers.—"our"—Again.—"home."

He doesn't know, can't know the mass of arousal and crawling terror that _home_ and _fucking Dean_ in the same sentence stir up. Can he? Sam shakes his head, trying to get it to work right. Dean crooks his fingers, and Sam shivers hard.

Dean sucks him in again. Dean's lowered eyelashes and Dean's clever tongue and Dean's stupid ears, and Dean's _lips_, Jesus Christ, and Dean's hand nearly buried inside him. Meg. Sam half wishes he could stop remembering things. When Meg had him, she played, found a girl, made her use her whole hand—

Sam comes and Dean doesn't even take him out of his mouth. He backs off on fucking Sam with his fingers, easing them out of his body until he's only got two in him, rubbing almost gently at the spot inside, but he swallows whatever amount of come he's managed to wring from Sam without breaking the seal of his lips and just keeps going, long past the orgasm, even when Sam is completely limp.

The whimper Sam makes isn't even humiliating at this point. Or, it is, but it's past mattering. "Dean." Not a very specific plea, but for most of Sam's life, it's been the only word he's needed.

Dean meets Sam's eyes. If there's any sight more obscene than Dean with Sam erect in his mouth, it's Dean with Sam in his mouth soft. He looks straight at Sam, tongue wrapping and prodding and tugging, and Sam can read the message in his eyes fine: _I am not taking my mouth off you until you get it up again, and very possibly not until you come._

It isn't even pleasurable. Dean's mouth on him right now is just about the opposite of pleasurable. It takes a conscious effort of will not to wrench himself away and curl up in a ball, because Sam's cock has been through enough, really it has. All he has to do, Sam knows, is to say, _Dean, stop_. Dean would. Just like Sam could get out of the cuffs if he chose. Yet he does neither, and it's only half because there's a certain promise underneath the pain, like any good torture. Relentlessly, with frightening patience, Dean works to bring the blood back to Sam's groin, and Sam fights through every second to let him.

This has to be the last time. Surely this is the last time. The woolen blanket prickles at his back; Dean's fingernails scrape over his thigh, around his knee, down his calf. Physically, Sam feels more like he's raced a half marathon than like he's been flat on his back for the past hour or more. He swallows, rolls his shoulders, tries to let the tension run out of his body, wraps the leather strap around his hand and grips it. Blood pounds in his veins, sluggish but thundering; his eyes refuse to focus and he shuts them, leaving him with nothing to distract from the sensations in his skin and the sounds of Dean's mouth. He's hard again—maybe not rock-hard, but hard enough—and the stimulation is starting to be good. Pleasure blends with the ache in his muscles until he can't separate them anymore.

Dean takes his mouth away from Sam's cock with a gasp and rubs his cheek on Sam's thigh. Sam opens his eyes to look at him. It's good to see him thrust into the mattress like that, to see him lick his lips.

Dean shifts slightly and Sam's hips fly up, sliding slick under Dean's hands with sweat. Something twists through him that's a lot like orgasm, only there's no release and the feeling starts building again immediately. Dean's realized he's onto something—he slides his hands under Sam's ass and keeps going. He looks like a striking snake, or an animal over its meal. Sam's entire groin aches. This is pleasure, he doesn't know what else to call it, but it's pleasure with teeth and claws. Another peak hits him, and another. Someone's sobbing. Sam realizes its him.

There's the absolute peace of concentration on Dean's face. Sam feels like he's coming apart. It isn't that the sex is that mind-blowing; it's something that's been building for weeks, and finally turning himself over to Dean is just the last grain on the scale. People talk, facetiously, about torturing someone with sex, and they mean something like this. Dean knows another meaning for it.

Like a telescope lens snicking into place, the overpowering yet vague sense of exposure that's been with him ever since Dean got him on his back sharpens into the specific, absurd idea of having an audience. Sam's breath speeds up. There's no one here but them. Not people, not creatures, sure as hell not some Man of Letters who got lost in the basement for sixty years. He makes himself breathe more slowly, not too deeply. In for three counts, out for two. They've fucked in back alleys, they've fucked in the car pulled over on the side of the road, there is no one here to see them and it wouldn't matter if there were. There's no one to see him like this but Dean. But Dean.

Why is Dean doing this? This is the sort of thing Dean should be doing for anybody but Sam.

The words to make it stop are bursting on his tongue: _get off me get off me get off me_. But they don't come out. He almost can't not let them, but there's the pressure of the cuffs on his wrists, a thin, steel wire it cuts to hang onto. He comes with the words still scrabbling at his throat.

Slowly Sam's pulse winds down, and the constriction eases around his throat. His breaths have oxygen in them again. Dean works him through the orgasm, but with long, warm, undemanding licks, and it's not as agonizing as it seemed the last time. Sam blinks until the ceiling comes into focus. He's floating. The world seems suddenly, surprisingly clear. The room, the light, the color of the wood—clear, immediate, but quiet and still. The only sounds are his breathing and Dean's.

Dean clambers back up the mattress and stretches out, half on top of Sam, half beside him. His erection presses against Sam's side, and the weight and heat of it are shocking. The pulse of want in his belly is even more so. Sam lifts his head to look at Dean. Dean isn't smirking; he's just lying there, rubbing one foot up and down Sam's leg with an almighty boner poking into Sam's side, and looking. There's spit smeared over his cheek. Clumsily, Sam reaches out with his bound hands and wipes it off.

In reply, Dean slides his leg between Sam's and pulls himself atop him, fingers going to the tie on Sam's wrists. "You want out yet?"

Sam thinks about it, or tries to, while Dean shifts on top of his body and nudges Sam's spent cock with his own. "I wouldn't mind getting—" His voice is raw; he gestures inarticulately with his joined wrists to the leather tie and tries to wet his throat. "The cuffs are fine. I— I'd be okay without them. I think."

Dean straddles Sam, unties the long strap, and pulls it from the cuffs; it rubs a long, light burn against Sam's skin before it _thwaps_free. Sam doesn't immediately move his hands, but leaves them in front of him while Dean looks at him, waiting for—he's not sure what. Dean smiles slowly. "You look good tied up, Sammy."

Sam knows Dean's saying it to see him turn red, but he turns red anyway. "You do," Dean persists. "No wonder people are always doing it."

Sam glares at him and would bitch him out for that, which was a low blow, but Dean bends down and pushes his tongue past Sam's lips. Sam makes a noise. Dean isn't even kissing him, not really. He's just fucking into his mouth, fingers busy at one of the cuffs. For a moment Sam thinks Dean's unbuckling it, but then his arm is being pulled out, toward the bedpost.

He whips his head to the side. Dean's tying off one of the straps, putting it back more or less where Sam had it to begin with only without any slack. Sam looks back at him. "No. You're joking."

Dean grins the sunny grin of a man blissfully unaware of the size of his own ears. "You didn't think we were done, did you?"

Sam's other wrist is drawn out to the other corner of the mattress. He lets it happen in sheer disbelief. "No. There is no way. Not again."

"There's always a way, bro." Dean sits back to consider Sam's new position. "Yeah. That'll do. You do look good, though; you know that, don't you, Sammy?" He slides one hand up the column of Sam's throat, watching, eyes flicking to take in any change in Sam's face. "The bigger you get, you freak of nature, the better you look like this. And the better you like it."

Sam doesn't even know anymore what's mortification, what's exhaustion, or what's arousal. He'd buck Dean off him and onto the floor on his ass, he thinks, if he weren't so spent, or if his ass didn't ache, or if his ass didn't ache with the longing to have Dean in it again. "I hate you." His breath catches when Dean's thumb rubs across his Adam's apple. "I hate you a lot."

This time, Dean does smirk. "Not yet, you don't."

Then he reaches down and grasps Sam with purpose. Sam yelps, then groans. "Why did I agree to this?"

"Because I'm a sex god," Dean says, and he's not even trying to be cheesy, he just naturally _is_, with happy, uncomplicated lust, and he's also grabbing the lube, and now he's reaching behind himself with one hand and stroking Sam undeterred with the other while his bobbing, warm dick traces precome onto Sam's stomach.

"This is not happening," Sam says. "I can't, man. I won't."

Dean pulls his fingers out of himself, grabs some more lube, and grins down at Sam. "Oh, yeah. You will." As if in answer, Sam's dick twitches in his hand.

"Oh, fuck no," says Sam, and cracks up. He laughs until he's got tears in his eyes, and the whole time, Dean grins like an idiot and freaking _molests_ him until somehow he is hard again, and at some point this passed the point of ridiculousness.

They've been at this for a long time—hours, maybe, or perhaps that's just the fever—and Dean's held himself back while wringing one climax out of Sam after another. Now Sam watches him finger himself open, head tipping back, breath coming more heavily. He's so real in this papier-mâché place that he's terrifying, and for a moment Sam wants to say, Let's get out the knives, and the guns, and the salt, and make lists of everything we ever learned in Hell and see if we're as different as we think. The roll of Dean's hips as he comes up onto his knees is going to haunt Sam to the day he dies.

Then Dean lowers himself, and Sam's pretty sure that's going to be today.

The sound that comes out of Dean is unfair. The sound that comes out of Sam would be embarrassing if he still had the resources for embarrassment. Tight heat and friction and muscles working and this would be bad enough if he hadn't just been systematically flayed alive. Sam feels like he's losing his mind. It's not poetry; he's _done_ that. Not like this, though; not like an electrified string flossing back and forth through his whole body, not laughing through a mantra of "I hate you, I hate you, I hate you, I hate you" and straining spent muscles against restraints he's too far gone to even register properly. Definitely not with Dean rising and falling and sweating and smelling on top of him, because the first time Sam lost his mind, Dean wasn't there, and the second time, Dean could barely bring himself to touch him.

A hand in his hair, shaking him. Dean's face is right above Sam's. His eyes seem fixed even while the rest of him moves. "Hey. Hey. You with me?"

"I hate you," Sam says dazedly.

Dean drops his face into Sam's collarbone to stifle his laugh. "Yeah, Sammy. Got that." Lift of his hips, back down again. His hand cards roughly through Sam's hair and Sam turns into it like a dog. Pat, scritch of Dean's nails on his scalp. Clench of Dean's ass around him. Dean's folded legs clamp alongside Sam's torso, and Dean's feet are tucked up against Sam's thighs. One hand is planted on Sam's sternum, rubbing sweat into the cut there. In grappling, this is a mount that can lead to submission in seconds, but here it's just good balance. Dean's other hand pets at Sam's face, neck. Long, lingering touches, gentle shading into hard and back again.

A thought goes through Sam, cold but sickly arousing and years coming: _he likes me like this._

He blinks it away. As if Dean could possibly want to be stuck here wiping Sam's nose after all the shit Sam's pulled through the years. No, it's not that that makes Dean circle so close when Sam's weak. Just duty.

He's hot and confused and he wishes he could come. He shouldn't even still be in the game, but it's Dean, and Dean will always bring him back for more. The desire to climax at this point is less like hunger and more like the drive that takes over the body at the end of a run that's burned through every reserve. Dean's face as he rides him, eyes closed, lip caught between his teeth, is as toxic to Sam now as it was the first time he ever saw it. So good. As good as a kill. Almost as good as demon blood.

"Dean, please." He's unsurprised to hear himself say it. Didn't they both go into this knowing he'd beg eventually?

Dean rises and falls along a path he's perfected that does something completely magical to Sam's dick along the way. He's not even touching himself; he's just enjoying the ride. He grins down. "Please what, Sam?"

"_Please_. Come on, don't you want to get off, too?" Sam flexes himself up. It's an uncoordinated effort, but still gets a hiss and a little shudder out of Dean.

He's recovered in the next moment, though. "Nah, already came once. I can basically go forever, now."

It's true. Sam knows it's true. Asshole.

"Dean, please. Do anything you want, I'll do anything, just finish it, I _can't_."

"Hey. Hey." Dean bends down and kisses him not on his mouth but on his forehead, quick, almost furtive. His hand passes over Sam's face, wiping away tears, sweat, quite possibly snot, Sam doesn't even fucking know anymore. "You can, Sammy. You can, man. I'm not trying to stop you."

He really isn't. He's fucking himself on Sam hard and steady, just like Sam needs, doing everything he knows how to do to help Sam along; Sam's simply too far gone for any of it to work. "I can't," he says again.

"Yes, you can, you uptight son of a bitch. Come on. One more. Let me see you. Let me have it."

One more. One last, perfect memory. Everyone always wants one last, perfect memory. Sam doesn't know that his idea of a last, perfect memory involves him getting his balls squeezed dry, but apparently Dean's does. Sam follows the coaxing of Dean's thighs to thrust up when Dean comes down, but it's only enough to keep him on the edge, not enough to shove him over it.

Dean bites his lip, tongue at the corner of his mouth, and reaches over to the nightstand. For a moment, Sam's confused; then he feels the cold, heavy edge against his neck. Everything clarifies around the touch of the knife. Dean's eyes, the sounds in the room, the sensations in his own body, everything. It all crystallizes. He'd thank Dean if he could think that coherently. Dean clenches around him, tight, tight, and presses the flat of the blade against Sam's throat as Sam lets his head fall back. At some point, it's enough.

Coming this time is unlike any of his previous climaxes. More than anything, even more than the sheer pleasure-pain of it, he feels all the urgency dissolving, lifting up and away from him. Sam lets out a huge breath he didn't know he was holding, a gasp in reverse. Muscles throughout his body uncoil and leave him slack. As his eyes fall shut, he can feel the knife's tip dig into the meat of his neck.

"Fuck." Dean moves. The knife thunks into the bedframe and then Dean's back, scrabbling at the cuffs on Sam's wrists. He gets Sam free, rubs at where the leather bit into his skin, and shoves one of Sam's knees up. Unconcernedly, almost lazily, Sam blinks his eyes open to watch. Dean gropes around in the bedding until he finds the tube of KY again and slicks himself up, fast and sloppy. He gets lube all over the blanket. Sam doesn't care about that any more than he does about Dean's come still trickling out of his hole or the fact that he's lying here with his legs splayed wide and his cock spent on his belly. He probably couldn't move even if he could muster the willingness for it. He's watching Dean getting ready to use him, and though it's not enough to even interest his cock, it spreads a mellow warmth through his limbs. Pleasure without urgency, without expectation or goal.

Dean presses Sam's wrists into the mattress and pushes in.

Without the chase of his own climax to distract him, Sam can just watch and feel. He watches Dean bite his lip and feels the fight in Dean's body between the urge to fuck Sam through the mattress and the urge to take his time. Sam doesn't have an opinion; he's just fascinated by the clash written out on Dean's face and in the bunch of his muscles. Dean flexes his grip around Sam's wrists, thrusts in as far as he can, and drops his head forward with a groan.

"Finally got me the way you wanted me, and now you don't know what to do with me?"

Sam smirks. Dean never does.

Dean picks his head up. Some measure of Sam's own exhaustion is there in his eyes, if obscured for the moment by how turned on he is. "Yeah, well, I'll figure it out. I always do."

He puts one of Sam's legs over his shoulder, crooks his arm underneath the knee of the other, and sets up a slow, steady rhythm that lets him draw all the way back, driving hard and deep. Apparently he has decided on having it both ways: he'll take his time, _and_ he'll fuck Sam through the mattress.

"Hedonist," Sam mutters.

Dean hisses and drives in until his balls hit Sam's ass. "Damned fucking straight."

Like this, every muscle relaxed, higher brain functions long since checked out, his own dick soft between them, Sam can feel every inch of Dean, length and girth, feel the burn and the slide in a way he doesn't think he ever really has before. He drinks it down without the limiting factor of satiation. Dean knots his fingers in Sam's hair and burns Sam's skin with his mouth like he's trying to bite his due right out of Sam's chest, and Sam lets him, lets him, lets him.

Experimentally, Sam tilts his pelvis up and works inner muscles around Dean's cock, just to be able to watch his face and hear the bitten off noise in the back of his throat. All the past hours' torture was worth it to be a spectator to this show. Sam does it again, the nearest thing to resistance his body's capable of right now, and Dean buries his face against Sam's neck and picks up his pace. Dean's putting his full weight behind every thrust, pounding Sam hard enough to take away his breath, mouthing over Sam's throat until he finds the wound from the knife—such a small thing, really—and sucks desperately at it, tonguing hard as if he could fuck Sam even through his wounds, punishing and apologizing and soothing and relishing all in one. It was stupid of Sam to ask Dean why he was doing this. Their conversations are always bodily, sooner or later.

Sam lets Dean press his thighs open wider, still pliant. Picking up his head seems like far too much effort, but he chases Dean's tongue with his when Dean kisses him. Dean's fingers slide between his, flattening their palms together.

Dean's thrusts are growing more fluid, and when he brings his arms down around Sam's back, gathering him up even though Sam's too big for it, Sam knows he's getting close. Dean's tells are all ten feet tall when you know him. "Sam," Dean mumbles into his hair. His sweaty, disgusting hair that probably smells and that Dean has his nose shoved into as far as he can. Sam finds the energy to wrap his legs loosely around Dean's waist, cradling him.

Dean tightens his arms around him and stiffens. A soft sound that might or might not be Sam's name gets muffled into Sam's hair and the pillow. Dean keeps moving even after he comes, slowing until he comes to a stop, and Sam feels him shiver and exhale against his neck.

Small sounds in the bunker filter in through the door they never closed: the barely discernible sigh of the central air; faint, irregular ticks in the ducting; hums from the equipment. Once again Dean hasn't bothered to pull out, though there's so goddamned much lube around at this point that that can't last for long once he softens, and then there will be an unholy mess, and Sam really should care about that, considering that they're on his bed. Dean rubs a stubbly cheek against Sam's jaw. He's in luck; Sam is way too tired to bitch him out for getting come all over the place, much less for Hallmark moments.

Dean isn't much of a blanket, though. Sam pushes half-heartedly at his shoulder. "All right, come on, get off of me."

Dean shifts, cracks his neck, and rolls to the side. "What, not even a 'thank you'?"

"Thank you, Dean, that was amazing, my life is changed." Sam makes the mistake of looking at the lamp, and the light stabs straight into his head; he presses the heels of his hands into his eyes to wait for it to pass, then leaves them there, half from enervation, half so he won't have to see Dean look at him like he's dying.

Sam doesn't realize that Dean's even left the bed until the mattress dips under his weight again as he returns. Dean moves Sam's unresisting limbs and then Sam feels the touch of cotton. The shirt Dean ruined at the start of this. Dean cleans him with businesslike strokes that stop mercifully short of being gentle. Sam can't quite keep back an inarticulate sound, but it's not embarrassment, not quite, not anymore. He's pretty well past that, if only for a spell.

"Let's go back to the blanket fort," he says, on impulse.

Dean sits up next to him. "What, you want to go stargazing right now?"

Sam doesn't waste energy on rolling his eyes. "No, dumbass, to sleep. Pretty much every blanket in this place other than this one is in there, aren't they?"

"Point." Dean climbs off the bed, whacking his knee into the side of it with a hollow wooden sound and a reflexive curse. Sam gives himself a couple of seconds to just lie there, drained, then peels himself off of the mattress. While Dean chucks the soiled blanket into a corner and retrieves his boxers from the floor, Sam gets the sleeping bag from underneath the bed, considers finding his own underwear, discards the idea as too much work, and wraps the still-mostly-clean sheet around himself.

"Toga party?" Dean says as they head back out towards the library, leaving the lamp on in Sam's room to light the way. "And here all this time I thought you hadn't learned anything in college."

They pick their way back towards the heap of chairs and blankets. Sam feels Dean's hand stray briefly to his back when his sense of balance hiccoughs for a moment, but pretends not to.

At the back of the fort, by the telescope, they make a nest out of the blankets and the sleeping bag and Dean's specially purchased duvet. "This floor is goddamned hard," Dean mutters, punching his pillow as he fusses with his half of the blankets.

Sam snorts without moving. He already feels like he's merging with the floor. "Memory foam is making you soft, Dean."

In the barely-there light that he might only be imagining, he sees the curve of the telescope barrel and the cloth walls Dean made. It isn't home, maybe, but it's a respite. Sam supposes he can accept that.

**:**


End file.
